Canadian Tire is a Canadian retail company that operates in the automotive, hardware, sports, leisure, and housewares sectors. Its Canadian operations include: Canadian Tire, Mark’s, FGL Sports, PartSource, and the Canadian operations of Party City. In 2019, Canadian Tire registered $14.5 billion in revenue and $895 million in profit and held $19.5 billion in assets. Headquartered in Toronto and employing +68,000 people across the country, Canadian Tire operates a network of 1,700 franchise stores and gas bars that extends to every province and territory except Nunavut.

Canadian Tire had many varied, one-off systems built and inherited through acquisitions over the company’s 90-year history. There was a need to consolidate a variety of disparate systems and data sources due to their growth and expansion. Several departments within Canadian Tire needed access to real-time information from a centralized access point to enable enhanced collaboration across geographies, business
units, stores, distribution centers and corporate departments. The brand needed a solution that could help them achieve real-time collaboration while retaining brand identities from a single, centralized access point.

Why Veriday?

Canadian Tire chose the Liferay platform for this solution for multiple reasons.

They had been using Liferay 6.2 previously for their other applications, which Veriday was originally hired to provide help with. They wanted to continue to use Liferay – and Veriday – for this project, which would be their first on 7.0.

They also wanted to continue to use Liferay because it gave them more ability to customize their solution than their previous Sharepoint 2005/2007 platform, which was getting to the end of life stage and their newer versions didn’t allow them to do everything they wanted/needed. Sharepoint had big scaling/performance issues with their previous solution causing business workflow constraints and operational problems.

Liferay allowed them to achieve a better/richer user experience, primarily around search functionality as well as things like the “New This Week” Calendar.

Canadian Tire wanted to create a solution focused on supply chain insight, with visibility into the entire flow of the supply chain. They wanted self-service solutions and real-time information, with detailed visibility into all orders, history and status, helping stores allocate and plan resources to receive new merchandise.

The main goal of this project was to replace the legacy system and upgrade the capabilities and experience from that Sharepoint platform to a modern platform that helped them achieve those goals. Choosing to use Liferay 7.0 also allowed them to leverage Veriday’s expertise with the platform. Veriday is a leading platinum Liferay partner in Canada and has been building innovative Liferay solutions for over 10 years for multiple Fortune 500 companies.