Future-Ready Retail: Harnessing Hybrid Integration for Scalability and Customer-Centric Experiences

In today’s fast-paced retail landscape, staying competitive means meeting customer expectations across every touchpoint—online, in-store, and beyond. For many retailers, this requires striking a balance between innovation and stability. Enter the hybrid approach: integrating cloud and on-premise technologies. While on-premise systems like point-of-sale (POS) terminals and inventory management remain the backbone of day-to-day operations, cloud technologies bring scalability, advanced analytics, and personalized customer experiences into the mix.  By connecting the two environments, companies can modernize incrementally, extend the life of their legacy investments, and achieve real-time data synchronization without disrupting operations. This hybrid approach also provides flexibility, allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing demands, scale resources as needed, and optimize workloads based on cost and performance.

For retailers, SAP Integration Suite provides the flexibility to adapt to changing market demands. SAP Integration Suite bridges the gap between traditional systems and modern digital strategies by enabling seamless communication between on-premise infrastructure, like legacy POS and inventory systems, and advanced cloud-based solutions. This ensures that retailers can modernize incrementally without disrupting existing operations. The platform supports real-time data synchronization, enabling omnichannel experiences and advanced analytics, which are critical for personalizing customer interactions. By offering scalability, flexibility, and prebuilt tools, it allows retailers to adapt quickly to industry changes and technological advancements, ensuring they remain competitive and ready for future challenges.

Case in point

Harrods, an iconic department store in London, made a strategic shift to an e-commerce platform to attract a new generation of affluent consumers. This involved extending its online marketplace to offer a wider range of products beyond what was available in-store. However, the company faced challenges with its existing integration environment, built on SAP Process Orchestration. The platform’s inflexibility and heavy business-critical transaction load resulted in maintenance issues, downtime, and missed revenue opportunities. Additionally, gaps in serving key markets like China and the Middle East further hindered its growth in the global e-commerce landscape.

A Modernized Integration Platform with SAP Integration Suite
To overcome these challenges, Harrods adopted a cloud-first integration strategy, powered by the SAP Integration Suite within SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This enabled the company to build a standardized, scalable, and stable platform that connected various SAP and third-party systems across both cloud and on-premise environments. With its ability to separate business-critical transactions from noncritical ones, SAP Integration Suite offered a robust architecture to support Harrods’ growing e-commerce platform. The company successfully deployed over 600 integration flows, many of which cater to its global e-commerce operations, processing two million transactions daily and managing over 100,000 products online.

Enhanced Operations Through Cloud-First Capabilities
Harrods further enhanced its IT infrastructure by migrating to SAP BTP’s Cloud Foundry environment, unlocking features like SAP Event Mesh for monitoring critical events and SAP Build Process Automation for process visibility. By integrating SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and third-party e-commerce systems, the SAP Integration Suite created a unified customer view, replicating data into SAP Customer Data Cloud. This integration also enabled Harrods to leverage SAP Analytics Cloud for insights on integration performance, allowing seamless connections across sales channels and better decision-making. Additionally, the modern integration infrastructure reduced operational costs and improved business resilience with automated upgrades and patching.

Future-Proofing with Integration and Innovation
With SAP Integration Suite, Harrods has transformed its business operations, enabling rapid scalability, real-time interactions, and efficient global market expansion. The platform’s flexible architecture allows the company to adapt to changing business needs and simplifies partner engagement. Looking ahead, Harrods plans to standardize API services, deploy electronic data interchange capabilities, and implement machine learning-driven integration scenarios. By leveraging SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology and the capabilities of SAP Business Accelerator Hub, Harrods aims to govern its integration strategy while accelerating business-to-business processes. This forward-looking approach ensures that Harrods stays ahead in delivering exceptional customer experiences in a fast-evolving retail landscape.

Read the complete case study here.

What this means for SAPinsiders

Adopt a Hybrid Integration Approach for Incremental Modernization: Retailers can balance innovation and operational stability by integrating cloud and on-premise systems. This hybrid model allows for real-time data synchronization, seamless omnichannel experiences, and advanced analytics without disrupting existing operations. SAP Integration Suite serves as a critical enabler, bridging traditional infrastructure like POS systems with modern cloud-based solutions.

Leverage Cloud Technologies for Scalability and Personalization: Cloud platforms provide the scalability needed to meet fluctuating demands and enable personalized customer experiences. By adopting tools like SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Event Mesh, businesses can monitor critical events, optimize workloads, and unlock deeper customer insights, ensuring their operations remain competitive and adaptive to market changes.

Future-Proof Operations with Flexible Integration and Innovation: Retailers should invest in integration solutions that support advanced capabilities like API standardization, electronic data interchange, and machine learning-driven scenarios. These features, as seen in Harrods’ success, enhance scalability, improve decision-making, and streamline partner engagement, setting the stage for sustained growth and resilience in a dynamic retail landscape.