eCommerce isn’t the cherry on the cake, it’s the new cake - Bob Howland
Tech is full of acronyms, and Bob Howland, the chief digital officer at bakery ingredient manufacturer and supply company Dawn Foods, believes “MACH” could be the industry’s next big one. Howland is one of the leaders of the company’s Digital Innovation Hub, an independent team within Dawn dedicated to digital transformation. One of the hub’s biggest projects of 2020 leveraged MACH architecture, and Howland told Built In Boston why he believes this approach is key to helping companies maintain their edge over the competition.
What’s the number one tech trend you’ll be watching in 2021?
Composable architecture, and more specifically, composable commerce. In order to future-proof technology, more and more leaders are moving to a modular or ecosystem approach where they select and assemble solutions from multiple providers. In this approach, the focus is on “fit for purpose” solutions that bring together “best of breed” provider platforms.
To make this happen, leaders need to adopt an architecture based on microservices, API-first or API-led, cloud-first SaaS and headless, or “MACH,” for their solution delivery. If one of the modules does not fit, you simply swap it out for a different solution as opposed to being handcuffed by a long-term contract with a bundled solution provider. Teams who adopt a composable approach and a MACH architecture enable their business to be agile, flexible, scalable and ahead of the pack.
Teams who adopt a composable approach and a MACH architecture enable their business to be agile, flexible, scalable and ahead of the pack.”
How do you plan to incorporate this technology into your work in 2021 or beyond?
We launched our first-ever e-commerce solution in 2020 using this composable approach and MACH architecture. In 2021, we’ll continue to roll out new features every two weeks while we optimize our composable tools. The team is using site analytics and business intelligence to identify where we’ll get the biggest lift and prioritize our development work accordingly. We are just beginning to realize the really big benefits around composable commerce, and 2021 should be a lot of fun for the team.
Another benefit around composable commerce is the ability to test and learn on a macro scale with solutions such as search, CMS, PIM and more. We are not only doing A/B testing on homepages but also testing and evaluating our search quality. The team truly is able to own the online customer experience at every level. But don’t take my word for it: Gartner predicts that by 2023, “organizations that have adopted a composable commerce approach will outpace the competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.”
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