Case Study

VeryChic: Legacy modernisation to drive scale and growth

VeryChic trusted the Codurance team to start its software modernisation journey and migrate its systems to the cloud. The new platform improved the user experience and has allowed the company to grow and adapt to change with ease.

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Verychic

Challenge

Evolving systems to increase maintainability and reliability

 

VeryChic, part of the Accor group, a world leader in hospitality, offers carefully selected luxury experiences in first-class hotels and VIP services. Its private members enjoy exclusive rates, discounts and unique travel benefits. All of its promotions, selected by VeryChic experts, must meet the requirements of ideal location, premium quality and uniqueness.

As VeryChic evolved, technical needs began to emerge that prevented them from scaling the business and providing a better experience for the growing number of users. Both the original website and the internal catalogue platform were complex to maintain, difficult to create new features and slow to update.

 

There was also room for improvement in optimising process management and collaboration between the IT team and other areas of the business. VeryChic recognised the need to improve its communication skills and establish effective feedback channels to facilitate better alignment between departments.

 

Faced with low bookings during the COVID-19 pandemic, VeryChic set out to solve these problems and undertook a bold transformation of both its technology and processes.

Codurance has made a lasting impact on VeryChic’s business. They not only supported us in building a vastly-improved platform, but also helped us embed modern software engineering best practices. We now have a website that gives our customers a delightful experience and a reliable platform we can confidently continue to build upon.

Sergio Vico Marfil

Chief Technology Officer - VeryChic

These sessions were extremely beneficial for our teams. They helped us understand the importance of more effective communication and reinforced the feedback culture; something that will allow us to continue improving our processes, stay more focused on business objectives, and achieve better results. It should also be noted that this session was very motivating for the teams, and since then we can see that the collaboration between them is very constructive and positive.

Lourdes Gatius Moreno

Head of HR - VeryChic

Project

A holistic approach to modernisation

 

We engaged with VeryChic to support it throughout its modernisation journey, which included moving from a manual platform with monthly releases to a CI/CD approach with multiple releases per day, rebuilding their website, automating catalogue management and implementing a new cloud infrastructure. 

In parallel, we advised its teams on development best practices such as TDD, Clean Code and Pair Programming. Thanks to the changes, its platforms are ready to scale and are secure and reliable. The IT team also has more time to focus on innovation and delivering value, rather than worrying about fixing bugs in the system.

 

In addition, we offered training in techniques to improve their feedback channels in order to enhance the quality of communications and collaboration.

VeryChic Case Study – Generic Image
Software Modernisation

Software Modernisation

The upgrades made to the website and platform, such as the move from a manual implementation of monthly releases to a CI/CD approach with several releases per day, were carried out with state-of-the-art technology that allows the company to adapt to changes with relative ease.

Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering

Taking advantage of the benefits and advantages of modernisation, we were able to implement, together with the VeryChic team, a new cloud infrastructure to facilitate service delivery and increase operational efficiency.

Product Development

Product Development

Codurance provided support in rebuilding the VeryChic website using a new look and feel and a more current framework. We also worked on a back-end redesign to incorporate scalability, security and reliability.

Training IT

Training

Training in engineering best practices such as Test Driven Development, incremental iterative development, Scrum and other current Agile development processes. Coaching in communication and collaboration concepts and techniques to foster a culture of feedback.

Strategic Advice IT

Strategic Advice

We assisted in the recruitment and interviewing of new members of the VeryChic development team to ensure sustainable capacity in the future.

Outcome

System and process optimisation

 

We established a successful professional relationship with VeryChic that allows us to continue to work with them to drive its growth and innovation. The company now has a new website and a scalable platform with future-proof technology that will allow its experts to easily update and manage product listings and availability. In addition, its customers now enjoy a personalised and easy-to-navigate user experience when booking their hotels and experiences.

Reduced catalogue update time from 1 hour to 2 minutes

New cloud-enabled platform

New communication channel between areas

The culture and motivation of the development team has evolved towards an openness to new practices that allows them to confidently deliver enhancements to the platforms functionality that are more aligned to the company's business needs.

 

The teams have been able to establish and adopt concepts and structures of a valid model of collaboration in which a culture of feedback and effective communication is the basis of their interactions and enables them to achieve better results for the business.