Dunelm increases innovation and scalability with migration to AWS
Homeware retailer, Dunelm has 175 stores across the UK, five home delivery network hubs and five distribution centres managed by a tech team of 300 people. Traditionally, Dunelm’s workloads were hosted in two data centres, which meant its teams had to manage about 30 separate supplier contracts, which meant things weren't as scalable as the company desired.
In 2019, Dunelm switched to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which gave it the flexibility it needed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the retailer had to adapt to the rapid changes in customer demand, as well as forced store closures.
“We reckon our developers are 30–40 percent more productive on AWS—they can just get on with writing code, creating new services, and solving problems,” said Chris Brocklesby, chief information officer (CIO) of Dunelm. “This means we’re a great place to work for people interested in making use of the best technology and not having to spend time worrying about infrastructure issues. We’ve moved 500 servers to AWS, so it’s been a huge reduction in management and infrastructure overheads.”
More recently, the company has migrated its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning system onto AWS and made its back-office systems future-facing, just like its customer systems. The migration was completed in six months and Dunelm shut both of its data centres in order to become a cloud-first company. Dunelm recorded a 30 per cent increase in speed, completing 1-hour batch jobs in 40 minutes.
A resident architect was provided by AWS ProServe so that there was someone always available to offer SAP specialist knowledge and to validate design decisions. “The ProServe team really helped us with SAP migration,” added Tom Hayman, director of platform and operations at Dunelm. “The move would have been slower and tougher without their expertise.”
Hayman added that, thanks to AWS, he that his staff are able to focus on innovation rather than on maintenance, which has also improved working culture.
