Avon

We started working with Avon in December 2013 on the MAPS project, under a direct contract with Avon UK. From 2016, the work expanded with the development of My Avon Store, commissioned by Avon Cosmetics Hungary. The two projects served two separate areas: one online sales, the other marketing catalogue planning.

My Avon Store is Avon's webshop for customers who do not buy through the sales representative network. Besides product listing and payment, it also handles delivery, integrating with several external systems for this. Every country served has its own regulations, so the application had to be customised country by country. Development took place exclusively in Budapest, for several countries.

The team was responsible for the entire .NET back-end development, the business logic and the interfaces of the connected systems. The work started with a smaller headcount and grew continuously.

The team: 2 architects, 1 business analyst, 10 .NET developers, 2 Scrum Masters – not all of them full-time.

MAPS supports the business planning of Avon's monthly product catalogue: the placement of products is based on the analysis of sales data from previous periods. The work started as the further development of an existing catalogue-planning system, but in reality we rewrote the old code from scratch – practically a greenfield development.

We replaced the old JSP-based architecture with a REST service framework based on OSGi/Karaf and Angular, so components can be replaced in the running system without downtime. Two key developments were delivered. One is the drag & drop visual editor of the edit-offer function. The other is a machine learning algorithm that estimates sales volume from previous years' data based on product placement, ad size, colours and other parameters.

The team: 9 people – a PL/SQL developer and full stack developers.

MAPS was delivered in a nearshore model: business analysis and project management were done by Avon UK, while architecture and development were at BlackBelt. The My Avon Store team worked according to the Scrum methodology, as part of an international team based in several countries.