Fast-tracking digital agility for Banner with Adobe Commerce expertise
Unified EPOS Implementation
Standardised over 5,000 POS lanes across 3,000+ stores in Ireland, the UK, and Spain, ensuring consistent customer experiences.
Cost Efficiency
Achieved significant cost reductions through bulk purchasing and streamlined support by consolidating to a single EPOS solution.
Right fit
Identified and implemented the ideal EPOS solution to meet Musgrave Group’s specific needs for optimal performance.
Challenge
Meeting the demands of a fast-paced market and evolving customer expectations
Banner, a leading UK school clothing supplier, faced a critical challenge: evolving its digital commerce capabilities to keep pace with customer expectations and business demands without incurring incremental IT costs. While their Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento) platform provided robust capabilities, the challenge lay in maximising its potential and customising it to meet the specific needs of end users.
As a school uniform business, Banner’s sales peaks occur in the school summer holidays from Easter into the summer. Consequently, website sales, order processing, and fulfilment must perform optimally during this period. Additionally, school uniform sales involve multiple nuances, requiring the system to accurately match the right uniform to the user, both on the front-end website and the back-end systems that feed into order processing and fulfilment lines.
Banner required a partner with deep retail expertise who could bring efficiency, predictability, and quality to the project, enabling its digital team to drive rapid, ongoing improvements. The objective wasn’t just about optimising a website—it was about creating a flexible, scalable and affordable solution to enable faster delivery of digital features, improved customer experiences, and long-term business agility.
Approach
Augmenting Banner’s digital team to accelerate change
PMC approached the challenge with a focus on collaboration, flexibility, and quality. Rather than delivering a one-off solution, PMC’s preferred way of working is to augment the client’s team with their own teams based in Vadodara, India, operating as one team in a continuous improvement loop. This approach prioritised:
- Augmentation of Banner’s IT capabilities: PMC embedded an experienced Adobe lead and digital engineering experts within Banner’s team to enhance their ability to manage and execute changes at speed.
- Deep technical expertise: PMC’s engineers brought hands-on experience with Adobe Commerce and omnichannel ecommerce, enabling them to tackle technical debt, streamline processes, and unlock the platform’s full potential.
- Holistic analysis and planning: PMC worked in unison with the Banner team to understand the nuances of their customer journey, identify bottlenecks, and align on a roadmap for improvements. This included analysing code quality, integration challenges, and operational inefficiencies.
The emphasis wasn’t just on fixing the immediate pain points but on building a foundation for ongoing innovation and faster delivery of digital outcomes.
Solution
Empowering digital agility through collaboration and expertise
Once the groundwork was laid, PMC took over the management and operation of the ecommerce platform while continuing to act as an integrated part of Banner’s digital team. Key outcomes of this collaborative approach included:
- Streamlined integration with existing infrastructure: Leveraging a cloud-based integration layer previously developed by PMC, the team was able to rapidly connect the Adobe Commerce platform with other critical systems. This enabled faster deployment of enhancements.
- Incremental improvements with measurable impact: Within weeks, PMC began delivering small but impactful changes to the ecommerce platform, building momentum and confidence within the organisation. A major update to the website was successfully implemented soon after, further improving performance and user experience.
- Technical debt reduction: By addressing underlying issues in the platform’s architecture, PMC enabled Banner’s team to regain control over the system and pave the way for future innovation without being hindered by legacy challenges.
Outcome
Driving business value through enhanced digital capabilities
The partnership with PMC delivered tangible results that went far beyond a redesigned ecommerce platform. By augmenting Banner’s digital team with scalable, flexible, and highly skilled engineering resources, PMC enabled the business to:
- Accelerate the rate of change: Banner’s IT team gained the capacity and expertise to deliver new features and improvements more rapidly than ever before, meeting business demands with greater agility.
- Improve operational efficiency: The collaboration fostered a more streamlined and cost-effective approach to managing the software development lifecycle, allowing Banner to deliver higher-quality outcomes without breaking the bank.
- Shift the organisational mindset: By removing IT constraints and focusing on delivering measurable digital outcomes, Banner’s business and digital teams gained renewed confidence in their ability to meet customer expectations and capitalise on market opportunities.
- Ensured commercial stability and affordability: The PMC commercial model that provides UK management and India-based Engineering skills provided cost certainty allowing Banner to plan effectively and remove IT budgetary constraints to service business demand.
Partnering with PMC has been a game-changer for our digital strategy. Their ability to embed themselves as part of our team, tackle complex technical challenges, and deliver impactful results with cost certainty has exceeded our expectations. We now have the agility and confidence to deliver digital outcomes that truly align with our business goals.
