Our customers say we are fast because we take great care to be agile.

Agility

In order not to get lost in technicalities and to make us understand better, we will use INDITEX as a "mirror" company, a company that has been innovating for years to be agile and that undoubtedly is a magnificent reflection with which to compare itself.

Inditex is one of the most studied business models in faculties and business schools. Its business vision is well known: the "democratization of fashion", the approach of design to the mass consumer. But what has really differentiated it is the ability to generate new products and react to market changes much faster than its competitors.

It is of little use to have the capacity to distribute hundreds of thousands of products around the world if you are not able to react quickly to a change in the market that makes a product outdated and loses the interest of the consumer.

This need to be not only fast, but also agile was something that Inditex understood many years ago. The rest of the story, as we have already mentioned, is today a subject of study in universities.

A 4-step cycle: Similarities between Barbara IoT and Inditex

Inditex markets textile products, covering the entire process from design to direct sales to the customer. Being faster, more agile in this process requires faster transitions between its four basic blocks.

The basic blocks in the case of Inditex are the design of the products, the sourcing of materials and manufacturing, distribution and logistics and finally, the points of sale.

In Barbara IoT we follow a similar scheme. In our case, the blocks are development, integration, deployment and operations. And we also, like Inditex, make sure that the transitions between these blocks are as fast and automated as possible, both in the case of deployments in the cloud and in the case of deployments on the Edge .

Design and Development

Inditex has a huge team of designers at its design headquarters in Arteixo (A Coruña). Already in the 90s, these designers received real-time data on the sales of their products. They could measure and capture trends and the most popular designs in real time. They are also characterized by manufacturing a large number of designs per year, although with a very short print run, in short, very short cycles.

Inditex carries out very short production runs to avoid the accumulation of stock following the concept developed by TOYOTA of "Just in Time" manufacturing. <- Cycle time -> Barbara IoT makes very small code releases to avoid conflicts by integrating the work of its different teams following the "AGILE" methodology.

Sales data from all of the group's stores is received in the design centre in real time, allowing success to be measured and decisions to be made for future designs. <- Feedback -> Barbara IoT developers receive performance metrics and system usage in real time, allowing them to measure the success of new features and make strategic decisions.Barbara IoT

2. Manufacturing / Integration

For Inditex, manufacturing is the process by which the "patterns" made by designers are converted into textile products.

For Barbara IoT , integration is the process by which the "code" that developers make becomes software.

Automating as much as possible is vital to be fast at this point. Of special importance here is the automatic testing process (quality tests of different types), which will be responsible for ensuring that despite the reduction in process times, the quality of our product continues to meet the required standards.

Inditex automates the necessary processes for the supply of materials as well as the necessary configurations to manufacture each product. <- Processes -> Barbara IoT automates all code integration processes according to what is known as "Continuous Integration".

All tests performed on the products are automated to reduce delivery times while maintaining the quality of the products. <- Quality -> For any change that is made in the code, integration, functional, load, etc. tests are automatically launched.Also every night automatic tests of the production code are performed.

3. Transport / Deployment

It is clear that the goods transport process of a company like Inditex does not have much in common with that of a company dedicated to digital solutions such as Barbara IoT.

Inditex, instead of focusing its production exclusively on more profitable Asian countries, groups its factories in clusters close to distribution centres. It also makes use of high-level logistics services to reduce delivery times as much as possible.

In the case of Barbara, the use of Docker containers in the deployment (a box containing software, analogous to shipping containers containing clothes in the case of INDITEX), enables all software delivery to the different systems to be as agile and fast as possible, whether we are deploying to systems hosted in the cloud, as in the case of updating applications on the Edge.

4. Sales / Operations

As we know Inditex does not invest in advertising, but instead they open their stores in the most privileged locations in the best cities in the world.

Barbara IOT offers its services on infrastructure (servers) hosted in the cloud. Also all processes in this part are automated, thanks to Kubernetes .

The fact that our "stores" are automated infrastructures, allows us to scale services in real time according to demand, or deploy different services with different customizations and configurations in minutes.

Centralized management of all your points of sale. -> Management -> Central and automated management of all services through KUBERNETES.

Extreme agility to open new stores or to renew the design or stock of existing ones. -> Logistics -> Deployment of new images in production a nd start-up in just minutes.

Different commercial brands covering different market niches (ZARA, ZARA HOME, BERSHKA, etc). -> Customization -> Ability to deploy new images to the respective client environments and apply customizations and configurations to them in minutes.

Possibility of scaling in number of points of sale in weeks / months.-> Scalability -> Possibility of instantly scaling services according to workload in minutes.

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DevOps and horizontal communication in Barbara IoT

The first vitally important change Inditex made in the 1990s was to re-feed the model from sales to design. The innovation was to make communication flow smoothly between all its departments.

From a software point of view, this change meant moving from a "Waterfall" methodology, where the result of a process block goes directly to the next process "without turning back", to an "AGILE" methodology where the process is circular and the system is continuously fed back with short and agile cycles.

Waterfall vs Agile

Barbara IoT, in addition to following the AGILE methodology, implements CI/CD (Continuous integration-Continuous Delivery) and also automates all its deployment processes in infrastructure (with the use of Kubernetes), which means after all the adoption (at least at a technical level) of the DevOpsmethodology.

But if anything characterizes Barbara IoT processes, beyond automation, tools, etc. is the horizontal and fluid communicationbetween all departments and the "start-to-finish responsibility" of all involved.

Barbara Devops

Final Data

Finally, let's look at some figures that can speak for us about the agility that our model offers us:

• Tiempo de desarrollo de una prueba de concepto (PoC): <5 días
• Tiempo de despliegue de nuevos dispositivos IoT en el campo (from sensor to cloud): <10 minutos
• Tiempo de parcheo de una vulnerabilidad zero-day de seguridad: <72h

Request a personalised demo and let's talk about what our IoT technology can do for your business.

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