case study in manufacturing

At data duke, we specialize in driving agile transformations that lead to tangible improvements in organizational efficiency and customer satisfaction. One of our most successful projects was with a leading company in the retail industry. Here’s how we helped them revolutionize their way of working.

Challenge

The retail company was facing significant challenges with their existing processes:

- Lack of transparency across teams and projects.

- Inconsistent release cycles leading to unstable product versions.

- Low stakeholder and customer satisfaction due to delayed and subpar product releases.

Our Approach

We employed a 2-way Agile transformation strategy tailored to the specific needs of ZEISS. In this case that meant to combine Dual-Track Agile and Test Driven Development. More concretely, our approach included:

1. Enhanced Requirement Transparency

   
   

   1. Established a process that supported a proper business requirement gathering funnel

   2. A backlog that collects business ideas, new features and change requests as well as the process of collecting and documenting them

   3. Involving all the right team roles in the process of requirement selection and definition

   4. Writing and ensuring that the Definition of Ready is followed

   5. Adding the first layer of TDD right here that meant writing test cases (happy and unhappy paths) that would initially fail but then be fulfilled after the development is through - for this case we used Selenium lib and the Xray as a tool

2. Improved Release Quality and Stability

   1. Adopted continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to streamline the release process.

   2. Integrated automated testing to catch and fix bugs early, ensuring more stable product versions.

   3. Conducted regular sprint planning and review sessions to align development efforts with business priorities.

3. Increased Stakeholder and Customer Happiness

   1. Engaged stakeholders through regular updates and feedback loops to ensure alignment with their expectations.

   2. Focused on delivering incremental value with each sprint, providing customers with continuous improvements.

   3. Implemented a customer feedback system to gather insights and make data-driven decisions for future enhancements.

Result

The transformation yielded remarkable results for the retail company:

• Transparency: Achieved an 80% increase in project visibility, enabling better decision-making and faster issue resolution (measured through number of requests being fully traceable, and NPS)

• Quality and Stability: Reduced critical bugs by 95%, resulting in more reliable and stable product releases. (no patch releases needed, the small number of critical bugs that showed up were dealt with before the release go-live)

• Stakeholder and Customer Satisfaction: Improved stakeholder satisfaction scores by 70% and saw a 55% increase in customer happiness ratings. (measured through NPS and direct customer calls)

Client Testimonial