Keeping pace with digital business Business changed dramatically in the three decades since Office Depot was founded. Determined to keep pace, Office Depot embarked on a digital transformation to address the challenges in the Internet age with online and omnichannel as the future.

“We have a ton of data. We don’t know what it’s telling us,” said Carl Brisco, senior vice president of ecommerce at Office Depot. Office Depot needed a way to correlate all of the metrics it was collecting with monitoring and marketing tools – and put them to work.

Limited performance monitoring and testing capabilities did not provide a complete picture of online success. Furthermore, the team responsible for managing online performance was buried within quality assurance with limited insight and influence on business decisions.

“Our performance testing team was embedded deep in the QA organization. Our testing was basically just push button, really the analog age for us,” recalled Erick Leon, performance engineering team lead at Office Depot, of the previous environment. “The testing team didn’t have much visibility, so we relied heavily on other teams to tell us what was wrong. For us, this was costly, not efficient really, because we didn’t have access to their tools. Also, in those days, the testing tools that we did have could only really test for one geographic location.”

In today’s fast-moving workplaces, Office Depot could no longer just take care of business, it needed anticipate and adapt to real user experiences in real-time – meeting expectations of customers, wherever and whenever they shopped for office gear.

Boosting productivity with modern performance technology Office Depot ran a proof of concept with SOASTA CloudTest® to modernize its load testing capabilities. “CloudTest was already using

the cloud to deploy load test generators, so this was awesome for us. Not only did we not have to finance additional hardware for testing servers and infrastructure, but we no longer had a limitation on the amount of users we were able to inject in our sites, really opening the door for true performance testing. That single item of user count opened up the opportunity to really simulate, for instance, Black Friday testing,” said Leon adding that Office Depot couldn’t generate this kind of volume before CloudTest. “It was really cost prohibitive with that previous tool.”

With the ability to test real-world scenarios to scale for the first time, Office Depot turned to SOASTA for solutions that could help it also understand real user experiences in real time and proactively manage online performance. The deployment expanded beyond CloudTest for load testing to incorporate other components of the SOASTA DPM Platform including mPulse™ real user measurement (RUM), Data Science™ deep data analytics, and the Digital Operations Center (DOC™) to monitor and maintain performance from a central location

“We do have a lot of data – from real-time user metrics, synthetic and APM tools, core metrics – but until lately we really didn’t have a central analysis tool that could help us correlate all of that data,” said Leon.

Performance is Everything

Office Depot Gears Up for Digital Transformation with SOASTA Office Depot, Inc. is a leading global provider of products, services, and solutions for every workplace. The company has annual sales of approximately $14 billion, employs nearly 50,000 associates, and serves consumers and businesses in 59 countries with about 1,800 retail stores, award-winning ecommerce sites, and a dedicated business-to-business sales organization. When Office Depot decided to promote online performance management from a back-office function to the forefront of business decision making, it turned to the SOASTA Digital Performance Management (DPM) Platform to start a digital transformation.

Case Study

“Now we’re able to take all of that data and see how performance is working in real-time – how it’s affecting conversion, how our campaigns are performing: Are they on the right landing pages? What are those landing pages? Are those landing pages optimized? What are those landing pages telling us?” added Leon about the DOC where his team proactively monitors performance. “So it’s all about taking the data and correlating it all to make better decisions to truly and positively impact our bottom line.”

One of the SOASTA capabilities that Leon found “very unique and relevant” was the Data Science correlation of marketing and performance data to assess campaign effectiveness and make adjustments in real time. Office Depot used its own historical data to build a model that it could take action on. “If a campaign is performing out of the norm, we can reactively amend to inspire conversion,” said Leon. With this capability, Office Depot set revenue targets for marketing campaigns, monitored them real time, and automatically pushed out additional promotions if the campaign wasn’t achieving targets.

With such innovations, SOASTA continued, “To move forward and surge ahead with technology,” said Leon. “Any time we bring any new requirements, SOASTA is always eager to find that solution and really deliver on that product. With previous vendors, we didn’t get that. It was pretty much, here’s the tool, and this is what you have. We really feel that SOASTA’s become a great partner of ours in that respect, continuing to move forward with our technology to better increase performance.”

Earning a promotion for performance management Online performance management has moved from the back offices to the forefront of the business, in part thanks to the SOASTA DPM platform. “Today we are part of the ecommerce operations team with access to real-time metrics – to front-end server, back-end server, database server, and all of the other support systems to our website,” said Leon. “We are now the focal point for complete round-trip response times, so we tell the other organizations where they need to look for performance degradations, if there’s any, and make recommendations as to how to solve those.”

“Our performance testing team has really evolved in that respect. Now we’re also moving to an automated load test creation by the use of the Sunburst reports that will model and create better real-user test cases. This will be molded right from our real user traffic.” For example, the Sunburst reports illuminated paths Office Depot hadn’t tested before, including critical pages that affect the success of promotions, such as campaign landing pages.

Office Depot also used the SOASTA DPM Platform to monitor, justify, and improve the impact of third parties on its site, leveraging the RUM data provided to facilitate productive service level agreement (SLA) conversations. “mPulse is able to really report daily on how those are performing, and their impact to conversion,” said Leon. “Any breach in that SLA can be discussed with those proper parties, or even third parties.”

Performance is EverythingTo learn more visit www.soasta.com or email us at info@soasta.com.

“Any time we bring any new requirements, SOASTA is always eager to find that solution and really deliver on that product. With previous vendors we didn’t get that. It was pretty much, here’s the tool, and this is what you have. We really feel that SOASTA’s become a great partner of ours in that respect, continuing to move forward with our technology to better increase performance.”

- Erick Leon, Performance Engineering Team Lead, Office Depot

Performance is everything

• Aligned ecommerce, marketing, and IT operations teams with common set of data

• Monitored and boosted marketing campaign performance with real-time tracking

• Defined conversion gains for a half-second page load performance improvement

• Saved money by not financing additional hardware to test at scale for peak loads

• Reduced headcount required with more efficient performance tools

He added that Office Depot planned to use Data Science to better understand the impact of synchronous and asynchronous page loads on conversions. “Some third-party resources are synchronous, which means that they will wait for the previous resource to load, while others are asynchronous and load simultaneously with others,” said Leon. “We really believe that the asynchronous resource should also load within the page SLA. I know that most will tell you it does not affect customer experience, but what we’re doing is we want to take that and see how it’s really affecting the overall conversion.”

Armed with actionable data, Office Depot was able to show how online performance impacted the bottom line. “We’re able to really tell what a half-second performance gain does for our page in conversion. We’re really able to set that standard,” said Leon.

Office Depot aligned its ecommerce, marketing, and IT operations with a single view of online performance provided by the SOASTA DPM platform. It was also able to measure the entire user experience journey and the impact on revenue.

“The one big thing that we have to understand is it’s not only about page performance, it’s all about revenue performance,” said Leon. “With monitoring real-time campaigns in our DOC and setting up the correlating alerts, we expect to really make a splash in our financial performance this year.”