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The Group Fournier is a French company specialised in the manufacture and distribution of tailormade furniture and fittings dedicated to kitchen, bathroom, and bespoke spaces.
In order to sustain its strong growth and continue to improve its quality
of service, the group has decided to implement a new "services" strategy, including an "extended enterprise" approach. This strategy has led to the creation of a new digital platform, involving a Move-to-Cloud programme. Aiming at modernising its
brands websites with Google Cloud technologies, the Group Fournier selected Sopra Steria to assist and perform the major transformation.
Next-Generation digital platform for empowering Groupe Fournier’s retail activities
Founded 115 years ago, the Group Fournier business spans over a comprehensive range of integrated activities including manufacturing, brand development, franchise management and retail dedicated to the home furnishing relative to the kitchen, the
bathroom, or tailored-made space. Listening, translating the desires of their customers into models and then manufacturing tailor-made products is the mantra of the Group Fournier teams. In this regard, the Group Fournier has developed a set
of digital sites for supporting its brands such as Delpha, Hygena, Mobalpa, Perene, Socoo’C. These websites allow the brands to showcase their universe and latest collections, to set meetings with their customers to initiate their project
and provide data on customer needs to the marketing teams.
Further to this initial investment, the Group Fournier has set new expectations to reinforce the presence of its brands and retail activities. updating websites more frequently, optimising availability and quality of service, as well as helping to
manage peak activity. In the longer term, this industrialisation should also enable the implementation of the “extended enterprise” concept to serve the group’s Industry 4.0 strategy. In 2021, the Group Fournier IT Department
has then decided to migrate its 20 websites, which were hosted previously conventional servers that no longer met performance, observability and security requirements, into the Cloud. The Group Fournier chose Sopra Steria, a recognised Google
Cloud partner, to lead the support and migration activities to the Cloud.
Move-to-Cloud, from the establishment of a Cloud Manifesto to Live Production
Adopting Cloud is not just a technological project. Sopra Steria NEXT consulting Teams first defined a Cloud strategy, integrating the entire organisation into this transformation project. With the help of Sopra Steria consultants, Group Fournier's
teams (Customer Experience, Offering Department, IT Department) defined a Cloud manifesto defining the industrialisation principles for the entire value chain and for all brands. In 2022, Sopra Steria's Cloud Center of Excellence teams then identified
a multidisciplinary team responsible for modernising the platform's technologies and architecture, establishing a "Migration Factory" and steering Cloud operations and security management.
Sopra Steria Teams especially assists with the:
- Definition of Cloud strategy, through workshops and a manifesto
- Evaluation of Cloud technology and sourcing
- Acculturation on Cloud-native practices in all the teams
- Definition of the new DevSecOps platform, and management of CI/CD pipelines based on GitLab
- Definition of observability, tracing and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices
- Redesign of the security strategy and solutions
- Refactoring of the website platform architecture through Google Apps Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Google BigQuery
- Migration and modernisation execution
This industrialisation, modernisation and migration programme allows the Fournier Group to benefit from reusable foundations that can be adapted to the new challenges and growing demands of its BtoB and BtoC sales entities. The selection of Google Cloud also enhances its CSR commitments to sustainability through the carbon neutral operations of Google Cloud's data centres.
Group Fournier and its brands design furniture to fit our customers' living spaces to their tastes. Our digital sites are at the forefront of our customer experience. By adopting the Cloud, we are improving their agility, availability and quality of service. And we can collectively look forward to extending these new practices to serve our Industry 4.0 challenges. This project puts digital at the centre of our new strategy.
Séverine STROPPIANA, CIO, at Groupe Fournier
Benefits
| For the IT Department | For Busness Teams |
- New digital platform to meet current and future performance, scalability, security and resilience challenges
- Cloud capabilities meeting the strong growth in business activity
- More agile, reliable and secure production, thanks to DevSecOps practices
- Implementation of a catalogue of industrialised and automated services simplifying the implementation of new services for the business
| - Acceleration of the marketing of new BtoB and BtoC services
- Functional gain, through the deployment of observability and application performance evaluation tools enabling customer behaviour intelligence
- Environmental benefits due to reduced GHG emissions of Google Cloud data centres
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