CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY | JULY 2015
Nordstrom Reduces Performance
Test Cycle From Three Months
to Four Days with CA Service
Virtualization
CLIENT PROFILE
Industry: Retail
Company: Nordstrom
Employees: 67,000
Revenue: $13.1billion (2014)
BUSINESS
Nordstrom is a fashion
specialty retailer that
operates 304 stores in
North America and serves
customers online in
96 countries worldwide.
It achieved record sales
in 2014.
CHALLENGE
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SOLUTION
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development
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environments
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enables
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BENEFIT
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growth
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competitive advantage.
2 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: NORDSTROM | JULY 2015
Business
Providing a fresh, relevant
shopping experience
ca.com
Headquartered in Seattle, Nordstrom serves customers at stores in the US
and Canada, as well as online to nearly 100 countries. Founded in 1901 by
John W. Nordstrom, the company has grown from a small Seattle shoe shop
to a leading retailer.
Nordstrom is committed to finding new, innovative ways to deliver the best possible
service and a fresh, relevant shopping experience to its customers that enables them
to shop on their terms.
Nordstrom currently operates 304 stores in 38 US states and Canada, with
118 full-line stores in the United States and Canada, 178 Nordstrom Rack stores,
two Jeffrey boutiques and one clearance store.
Additionally, customers are served online through Nordstrom.com, Nordstromrack.
com and HauteLook. The company also owns Trunk Club, a personalized clothing
service serving customers online at TrunkClub.com
Nordstrom has a strong record of growth, achieving record sales of $13.1 billion
in 2014. Nordstrom expects to reach a total of 300 Rack stores by 2020.
Challenge
Accelerating the development of
new apps and digital features
During its 114-year history, Nordstrom has evolved from an entirely brick and mortar
business to offering a customer experience that enables the customer to shop on
their terms – online or in stores. To ensure customer-facing platforms complement
each other, Nordstrom follows a customer-driven versus a channel-driven strategy.
As Suzanne Conniff, Senior Manager with Nordstrom, explains: “We’re focused on the
customer. Customers don’t think of themselves as ‘multichannel’ shoppers. They just
know they want a great experience however they shop. We’ve tried to integrate the
service experience across every single touch point we have with the customer so that
we can deliver one great Nordstrom experience.”
To be successful in an application economy, Nordstrom recognized that it
needed to transform its software delivery lifecycle and bring greater agility to the
development process. “We want to understand the business requirements and bring
relevant apps to market quickly, without sacrificing a great customer experience,”
comments Conniff.
The need for a faster innovation cycle also extends to the company’s web
development activities. As Conniff confirms: “Given how fast our business is evolving,
to serve our customers we need new online features to be produced more frequently,
which meant reducing our customary three months of performance testing to just
five weeks while still delivering a high quality experience.”
3 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: NORDSTROM | JULY 2015
Solution
A faster, more stable testing
environment
ca.com
To support the rapid development and deployment of high-quality, performant
applications, Nordstrom was looking for a number of solutions that would enable
it to transform its waterfall approach to software delivery to an agile model.
Lower environment instability was a true hindrance, a factor that effected the
application release cycle. Too much time was spent waiting for environments
to be stable and not enough time in development and testing activities to achieve
faster releases to production. Tools to help stabilize environments were analyzed.
After evaluating a number of tools Nordstrom decided to deploy CA Service
Virtualization in 2012. As Conniff remarks: “We looked at the feature set, the
protocols, and the latency, and CA Service Virtualization came out on top.”
“CA Service
Virtualization gives
us a more stable
and available
environment
for testing.”
Suzanne Conniff
Project Manager, Nordstrom
CA Service Virtualization provides Nordstrom with a simulation ‘wind tunnel’ for
testing new software that gives developers early indications of any issues that users
might face.
“CA Service Virtualization bridges the gap between development and operations
by supporting fast, agile parallel development from testing through to production,”
comments Conniff. “It enables us to maintain a continuous feedback loop to
development teams, which ensures a higher quality of code from the outset.”
The solution also accelerates and simplifies the development process by removing
infrastructure constraints. As Conniff explains: “CA Service Virtualization gives us a
more stable and available environment for testing, which means we don’t lose time
just because a physical component is down or a server is at capacity.”
Nordstrom’s developers can now develop and test different applications in parallel,
even when they need access to the same data, as the company experienced when
launching a new application for its customer loyalty program.
Conniff explains: “The Loyalty program developers all need access to the same sales
data – from our POS systems, website, and mobile app. With CA Service Virtualization
we were able to mimic the production systems and make the data available to
everyone at the same time, thereby enabling continuous testing and building in
quality code from the start.”
Benefit
Providing an engaging customer
experience with new apps and services
With the help of automation and tools, such as CA Service Virtualization, Nordstrom
can now increase the rate of digital innovation and bring better quality applications
to market faster. For example, Conniff and her team cut the overall development
cycle by 66 per cent for their customer loyalty application.
“We’ve reduced performance testing time from three months to five weeks – on
average, it’s now just four days,” reveals Conniff. “CA Service Virtualization helps
us bring better applications to market faster and establish our IT function as an
enabler of business growth.”
4 | CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: NORDSTROM | JULY 2015
“We’ve exceeded
our expectations
by reducing
performance testing
time from three
months to an
average of four
days.”
By optimizing application development and deployment, Nordstrom can:
• Safeguard customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Progress its omni-channel strategy
• Save $800,000 in productivity wait time
• Reduce costs, through avoidance of physical hardware and software expenditure.
The enterprise performance engineering team has also implemented CA Service
Virtualization as a part of its process to reduce the effort involved in setting up test
data by 75 percent.
Conniff concludes, “CA Service Virtualization facilitates the digital innovation that
helps us deliver a seamless and engaging customer experience across every channel.”
Suzanne Conniff
Project Manager, Nordstrom
Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com
CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business
– from apparel to energy – is being rewritten by software. With CA software
at the center of their IT strategy, organizations can leverage the technology
that changes the way we live – from the data center to the mobile device. Our
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