Global Retailer Transforms Transport Management

Overview

The world's largest furniture retailer manages one of the most complex supply chains on the planet. From timber plantations, to mills, to furniture factories, to global distribution centres, and finally to retail stores, the company moves several billion euros of freight annually.

Ensuring this global supply chain runs reliably is a mission-critical challenge. The company needed a robust global transportation management system (TMS) to coordinate freight movements, optimise operations, and safeguard resilience across its vast network.

Challenge

With billions in freight under management, the transportation management system was central to global operations. Yet it faced:

• Increasing demand for scalability and reliability

• High partner infrastructure costs

• Difficulty in managing multiple environments for testing, pre-production, and production

• Limited visibility into both technical performance and business process metrics

A failure in this system would risk delays, inefficiencies, and significant cost exposure across global operations.

Approach

Mark Kaye, now founder of Logistology, directed the comprehensive modernisation programme, transforming the global transportation management system through infrastructure optimisation, DevOps practices, and advanced observability platforms. The work focused on three core initiatives:

1. Infrastructure Optimisation & Automation

• Introduced automation and containerisation to streamline deployment and improve reliability

• Reduced server infrastructure by more than half, cutting partner costs whilst increasing flexibility in environment and data management

2. DevOps Vision & Cloud Transition

• Created and championed a DevOps vision, paving the way for a shift to cloud-based microservices

• Enabled faster delivery of new capabilities and closer alignment between IT and business priorities

3. Observability & Performance Insight

• Implemented a modern observability platform to monitor both technical performance and emerging business metrics

• Provided leaders with improved oversight and the ability to make more informed operational decisions

Results

Within six months, the company began to see benefits on a global scale:

• Operational resilience improved, ensuring mission-critical systems ran reliably across multiple continents

• Infrastructure costs reduced significantly, with a more efficient and flexible technical footprint

• Agility increased, making it easier to spin up environments, test changes, and roll out new capabilities

• Visibility and governance strengthened through advanced observability, laying the foundation for data-driven decision-making

Key Takeaways

This transformation demonstrated how a combination of technical leadership, automation, and strategic vision can deliver global-scale results in a short timeframe.

For Logistology, it was a defining foundation project:

• Proving the importance of reliability and resilience in mission-critical systems

• Showing how cost efficiency and flexibility can be achieved simultaneously

• Highlighting the role of DevOps practices in enabling business agility

This experience now informs how Logistology helps clients build supply chain and logistics systems that are resilient, efficient, and ready for the future.