The Client
The client, one of the fastest-growing, large CPG companies in the U.S. at retail, is a leading international producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits, operating in the US, Mexico, New Zealand, and Italy.
The Challenge
The client had an extensive product portfolio with more than 40 websites for each product. It offered customers online delivery and offline retail options, and in 2021, as a post-COVID strategy, it wanted to bolster sales made through its online channels. Through these online storefronts, the client wanted to market its new products and launch, tweak, or decommission campaigns as per customer response.
However, the client’s developer teams struggled to maintain the product websites due to a skills gap that made it difficult to deliver on exacting business requirements. The website releases and features ran into multiple issues around code generation and quality assurance. The client also did not have a roadmap to onboard technologies such as Generative AI (GenAI) that could unleash productivity and efficiency gains while increasing the go-to-market timelines.
In an almost stagnated development cycle, the client found it made little to no progress on its online strategy for over six months in 2024 – leading to lost opportunities in an already saturated market.
The Solution
The client turned to Persistent for its engineering prowess and a three-and-a-half decade-old digital transformation legacy. To streamline and automate the management and setup of online storefronts, Persistent recommended Shopify – an end-to-end e-commerce platform that offers full-stack retail services from billing to shipping. We helped the client migrate more than 40 websites to Shopify, enabling intuitive and responsive frontends with custom templates and curated design suggestions from Shopify’s creative team. The Shopify storefront comes with point-of-sale integrations, allowing the client to enable or disable marketing campaigns. We also developed templates for website accessibility testing and maintenance per business requirements.
To address issues in the development cycles, we recommended using GenAI to bridge the skills gap and suggested the client leverage GitHub Copilot – a GenAI-coding assistant from Microsoft. We trained the core members of the client’s developer team in GitHub Copilot and orchestrated external training from Microsoft experts, ensuring a 92.5% adoption. GitHub Copilot generated JavaScript and jQuery functions that helped developers quickly use those with minor modifications. It also helped the developer to modify Shopify’s new module codes generated in liquid. With ready-to-use JavaScript functions and HTML and CSS code, developers were able to finish their dev tasks ahead of time. GitHub CoPilot also helped automate unit tests for the code, which helped to increase test coverage and reduce defect leakage to production.
The Outcome
A quarter-long deployment of GitHub CoPilot helped the client:
- Accelerate go-to-market timelines for new product websites by 20%
- Improve developer productivity by more than 20%, leading to about 16% faster coding cycles and 100% developer satisfaction
- Generate ready-to-ship code with improved code quality, boosting code generation efficiency by 92.5%
- Opened developer bandwidth for more value-driving tasks that capture revenue opportunities
