DICK’S Sporting Goods Up-Levels the Shopping Experience with Confluent

As America’s leading sporting goods retailer, DICK’S Sporting Goods focuses on helping athletes achieve their personal best by making it easy to find the products and services they want and need. The 70-plus-year-old Fortune 500 company has more than 854 stores and 50,000 employees.

To help deliver on its stated mission to serve and inspire athletes while growing its business and helping communities, DICK’S needed a technology architecture that would allow it to build services incrementally, accelerate application deployment, and reshape the way athletes gain access to the product information in real-time for a more seamless purchasing experience.

The solution it chose needed to be a fully managed data-in-motion platform that was scalable, secure, resilient, and able to meet the real-time needs of its business.

Challenges

DICK’S Sporting Goods, an American sporting goods retail company, is focused on helping athletes achieve their personal best by making it easy to find the products and services they want and need. To deliver on this mission, DICK’S Sporting Goods needed a technology architecture that would allow them to build services incrementally, deploy new applications more quickly, and reshape the way athletes gain access to the product information in real-time for a more seamless purchasing experience. Previously, the data for pricing, promotions, and athlete purchases were siloed and DICK’S relied on batch processing to connect the various data feeds. This meant athletes could see a certain price or promotion on their phone in the parking lot, and then have an entirely different in-store experience. And the store service agent had an entirely different view into inventory, resulting in poor athlete interactions. DICK’S adopted multiple software solutions for a more integrated real-time view of their inventory but ran into issues of complexity, scalability, and resiliency that it could not solve on its own. DICK’S needed a fully-managed data in motion platform that was scalable, secure, and resilient and met the real-time needs of their business.

Solution

DICK’S selected Confluent’s cloud-managed service to connect their previously siloed data feeds to bring real-time view of all their merchandise, while also reducing the burden of managing and operating the platform. With Confluent, DICK’S handles pricing and promotions, marketing, and athlete services in real-time to ensure a consistent omnichannel experience and positive athlete service interaction.

Results

• It no longer takes hours to make changes across DICK’S omnichannel environment Data in motion allows them to fix conflicting promotions in real-time and ultimately prevent lost athletes and lost revenue.

• Athlete service representatives now have a full, up-to-date view of the athletes when they call in about orders and have cut resolution times in half.

• DICK’S ensures that their services are never down by deploying Confluent across multiple cloud providers and keeping the data in sync across the different environments, in real time. This enables rapid recovery from disasters and failures, business continuity, and an integrated resilience strategy.

Conclusion

Today, exceptional shopping experiences are no longer an option; they are paramount to any retailer’s success. Confluent’s platform for data in motion has given DICK’S the power of real-time data to ensure they meet the needs of their athletes from products to information and beyond. By removing the technical burdens of other legacy software solutions, they are able to accomplish their goals for continuous innovation and improvement and stay focused on creating more delightful ways to stay connected with their athletes.

Learn more about Dick's Sporting Goods