Auchan E-commerce: Progressively Migrating over 1 million lines of code!
The use of Symfony by Guillaume Magnier, Head of Back Office Development Center
We truly appreciate the technical expertise and dynamic energy of the SensioLabs experts. It’s wonderful to work with a team that knows how to focus on pragmatic solutions for every one of our needs.
Guillaume Magnier, Head of Back Office Development Center, Auchan E-Commerce, France
The company
To understand all the business factors associated with this colossal migration story, one needs to understand the enormity of the company involved. Auchan is one of the largest supermarket chains in France and their e-commerce sites (Auchan.fr, Auchandirect, GrosBill, Chronodrive) serve all of Europe. Their sites enable consumers to grocery shop , purchase electronics, etc. online and either be delivered at home, to the trunk of their car, or to pick up in their local store. The company declared over 62 billion euros in revenues for 2013 and employs approximately 287,000 people. They rank 13th in world distribution in their sector.
The problem
The existing, home-made PHP framework they were using was having trouble keeping up with their multi-international business that was growing at an exponential rate. Back office migration to Symfony 2 was an obvious choice for them. “We needed someone to present a new methodology of transformation for our SI Back Office and it needed to be adapted to our migration to Symfony 2,” Guillaume Magnier, Head of Back Office Development Center, Auchan E-Commerce, France.
The solution: Progressive migration
Optimized performance and the quality of the SOA architecture
Secured the functional perimeter
Mastered dependencies
Consolidated re-usable bundles and reviewed code
The story
Recognizing that their home-made PHP structure would never be able to support their exponential growth, they started exploring the possibility of migrating the entire back office to Symfony 2, a more robust and performant framework that would expand and grow with their business.
Undertaking such a difficult and all-encompassing project was delicate and they decided to call in the SensioLabs experts to handle the task. Aside from remaining operational during the migration, they brought a heavy list of requirements to the table: deploy international order management solutions, improve user experience, improve development, productivity and maintenance and insure functionality in multiple languages and multiple countries. “The work we did progressively migrating to Symfony 2 allowed us to reduce our technical debt, reduce project costs and delays and accelerate our Time To Market,” Guillaume Magnier, Head of Back Office Development Center, Auchan E-Commerce, France.
Since migrating to Symfony 2, Auchan E-Commerce has met all of their initial objectives: reduction in Time To Market, reduction of technical debt and fewer bugs. SensioLabs has since trained over 40 members of their development team and their projects are thriving. “Our experience with SensioLabs was so positive that we have since become privileged partners for technical expertise in all things PHP including architecture, coaching, and training. We have developed a genuine collaborative relationship that we appreciate immensely,” Guillaume Magnier, Head of Back Office Development Center, Auchan E-Commerce, France.
