Canadian Tire Adds a Centralized Employee Portal for Access to Real-Time Information.

Solutions Used

Liferay DXP 7.0

Application Development

Ongoing Platform & Application Support

Headquarters:
Toronto, Canada

Employees:
2400+

Industry:
Retail

Results:

500

Active Stores

<15 Months

Implementation Time

90%

Adoption Rate

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.

What Veriday Built

Veriday built a solution on Liferay 7.0 with a modern architecture that’s deployable to the cloud, and the flexibility and agility to evolve with new technology and future growth. It’s clear Liferay was the best platform to build Canadian Tire’s required solution that matched their goals.

The project ran with agile methodology, led by their project managers with our solutions architect leading the application and Liferay development. A joint team of developers from both Canadian Tire and Veriday were involved in the project. Outside of this project, Veriday continues to provide support for the platform as well as the application.

Veriday delivered a Liferay portal that is accessible from any device, offers rich personalization, and accomplished all of Canadian Tire’s wants and needs for their new application.

The Liferay portal is the primary communication channel between the Corporation and Store Operations. “Deal” Ordering Information, StopSales/Recalls, Critical Alerts (system outages, weather delays, etc..) are published and accessed via this platform.

Canadian Tire’s portal is built with a history of excellent open-source fundamentals, providing a decade’s worth of innovation from thousands of developers with the flexibility to tailor the platform to meet development needs that they outlined for this solution.

The Results

The portal solution Veriday built for Canadian Tire has achieved several results, including:

• Increased agility for their in-house IT delivery team, who are now able to deliver new features quickly.
• Increased internal satisfaction, by providing employees with the tools they need to do their job more effectively.
• Made data more accessible, from any device, anytime.
• Improved long-term value for Canadian Tire’s portal technology, by providing a scalable foundation that can evolve and grow with Canadian Tire.

The solution has achieved excellent adoption rates, with 90% of Canadian Tire stores using the platform on a day-to-day basis.

All of these results line up with the combined goals for Canadian Tire’s portal solution, improving overall productivity. Veriday knows that the portal solution built for Canadian Tire will help Canada’s most iconic retail brand continue to grow today, and in the future. Choosing Liferay and Veriday resulted in a great solution for Canadian Tire’s outdated portal.

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