Driving Retail Innovation with Fountain Tire and Edge Delivery Services

[Music] [Gabriel Laliberte] So hi, everybody. We're going to start momentarily. So thank you for being here today.

Welcome to the session Driving Retail Innovation with Adobe Edge Delivery Service. My name is Gabriel. I am the Head of Strategy at Valtech, the innovation company. We support and enable our client through digital transformation from multiple verticals from retail, CPG, manufacture, automotive. And today, we're going to talk about Fountain Tires and their digital transformation and their journey.

Before we go further, let's present and introduce the panel we have with us today.

Ladies first. Stephanie, do you want to present yourself? [Stephanie Proseilo] I'm Stephanie Proseilo, Director of Brand and Customer Experience at Fountain Tire and digital transformation falls under my team. And we've been working on all things from web to internal and we'll get into it more. But everything from brand to digital to customer experience. That's amazing. [Christopher Brabender] And hi, everyone. I'm Chris Brabender. So I'm the VP of Technology at Valtech for the Americas. So I oversee how we work with our experience and commerce technologies with Adobe being a key part of that portfolio.

So now that you all know us, let's dive right in, guys. So, Stephanie, can you explain us what are the business drivers that led Fountain Tire to pursue this digital transformation? Before we dive into the tech, what were the different business drivers that encourage you guys to do it? The reason for digital transformation is we're currently under an ERP transformation as well, which is going to enable us to just go further farther. But we needed the other tools that we're going to integrate and work with it to be just as on the front and enable us to do more. So we were on disparate systems. We had multiple systems. We had antiquated systems. We had a lot of technical debt in the backend. We knew from both statistics and customer reviews and whatnot. We were losing a lot of customers out of the top of the funnel. We were not delivering the experience that they would like, and we were losing opportunities both on the retail and the commercial side.

So we needed to re-platform. We needed to re-platform starting with the home, and then what are all the different things that we need to add onto it. So we started with the home first, which was the websites. We have four websites. Wow.

I understand while the business drivers and all this applies to the transformation, I like to often take those and bring the key challenges that are associated with those drivers. So do you have any challenges that made the cut or were the top priority that encourage you guys to invest and make this digital transformation? Cost. Cost was the big one. So we had a lot of external agencies that were very-- We were hands off and that we didn't have access. We didn't have an understanding of what the sites could and couldn't do. So it was very high level in terms of our direction and our ability to be able to update and maintain and transform those websites. So it was very costly, is very long time to go to market. We were very strapped with not being able to do things from both a technical level and a skillset level. Got it. So content was a big one in that we were very limited in what we can do in content, and it was also very layered and time intensive to be able to update it. So cost, time, access, technical debt.

That's very interesting. And I think it speaks to a lot of people in the room and at this Summit. Question for you, Chris. So how did Valtech align with Fountain Tire in terms of vision and strategy and technology to answer those challenges? Yeah, so we had a long series of discussions with Fountain Tire leading up to kicking off the project and going through our discovery process about the vision and the goals of the program. And while we were going through that discovery process, we realized that they needed to match their growth objectives. They needed a solution that was going to give them a second to none business experience to-- Business agility matched with that technical agility to deliver these goals. And that was going to power that second to none customer experience that we wanted to give to their customers. So at Valtech, our discovery process really works to marry the business and technical stakeholders throughout a series of really targeted workshops. So we want to make sure that we're covering all aspects of that program and that all sides are well represented in the requirements gathering and then into the solution design phase. So the Fountain Tires program really features more than just a one and done project, right? This is a multi-year enterprise transformation project. So together, we're bringing that multi-year program with plans to roll out multiple experiences targeting different areas of the business through commercial, retail and covering that B2C and B2B element of the business. So given this, we felt that building on a headless front-end with that composable architecture was really the right fit to set that up early in the transformation to give them that flexibility, that agility to deliver on the business and technical requirements that they were looking at. So with the timing, the release of Edge Delivery Services, it really made the stars align on how we were solutioning and setting up this project for long-term success.

The other advantage we have with Edge Delivery Services, not just the timing, not just the solution itself is the simplicity of the solution. And given cost was a key element here in upfront cost of the solution, but also the long-term total cost of ownership through Edge Delivery Services with the improved developer experience. So developers are up and running faster with this technology. We're able to iterate, able to release updates to that experience independent of the backhand systems in addition to improved content authoring workflows, which was key for Fountain Tire as well. So we're able to streamline those processes. We can cut down on the time to market for the initial build. We're up and running extremely quickly with this initial phase but then giving them the agility to release content faster, to push our campaigns faster...

And build out those experiences that they're really pushing to their customers. That's very interesting. And I think it encompasses the why. Before we touch the how, it's the why of doing this transformation and how Valtech supported that. Quick question, Chris, that's off script, but I think it's important to mention here, this portion of building the technology roadmap and this discovery process with Fountain Tire. What was the timeline or the time span for that period before we touch the how and the build to gather all the information you just mentioned? What was the time span to get to that with Fountain Tire? Leading up to the initial, so, it was a long discussion we'd had with Fountain Tire on this program. I think the initial period was something like 12 months just to get that project established and kicked off. But then once we got into our discovery process, it's a pretty streamlined process. It's something around the eight-week period. We go through all those individual targeted workshops, bringing those stakeholders into the room and it's really quite nimble getting through that agile process and into the delivery phase itself. That's amazing. And on your side, Steph, for those eight weeks, what kind of stakeholders did you have to gather within Fountain Tire in order to bring that project to life and get all the whys put together for the project? Definitely the business stakeholders. So the first one that we were working on was our commercial website for all of our commercial locations across Canada. And so we brought in sales, we brought in operations, we brought in IT security, we brought in information architecture, the marketing team, some legal and all of that. But really the main stakeholders were those that were going to be able to use it as a sales tool. I didn't mention in one of the business drivers before was for one of the first projects we had out of the gate, our front-end sales team were actually-- Their words were, "We're embarrassed by the old website." And they're like, "I won't use it. I'm not going to talk about it. It doesn't put us in a good light. It's old, it has wrong information." And so we knew that to have them at the forefront of the stakeholder engagement, we needed to build something that they would be proud of because it was going to be their tool in front of their customers. So they were almost customer one, so they were an important part of it. And then we had the IT marketing implementation and stuff like that. I find it very interesting that in order to summarize the why to start a project like this and a transformation like this, you brought in the end user as well as the business, and Valtech brought the strategy, but also the technical side to bring all this together. And within eight weeks, that was figured out. So now let's start to dive into the orchestration and how to build this. And to not see what we use, I think the title of this session will say that Edge Delivery Service was selected, but let's dive into the why and the purpose and how Edge Delivery Service enabled this transformation. So I'll turn the question to you, Chris, is can you explain a little bit how Adobe Edge Delivery Service enabled this transformation for Fountain Tire and maybe even what role Valtech played with Adobe into bringing Edge Delivery Service to life in projects in North America? Yeah, so the first phase of this project we worked on last year was really focusing on a really light brochure style website. It was non-transactional, to start with, it was bringing that catalog online to build out just product discovery experience providing product information for their commercial partners. So getting up and running on Edge Delivery Services is faster and easier than previous Adobe Commerce projects that we've worked on. We see that building out that front-end is much more nimble for our development team to get up and running and really push that front-end live. Combined with Edge Delivery Services giving us that front-end experience, giving us those content management capabilities, we're building those fully decoupled APIs into the catalog service, the SaaS service that are available from Adobe. So we're pairing that Edge Delivery Service front-end with the SaaS APIs, our live search capabilities to make sure that product discovery is really strong there. So that's bringing in live search, that's bringing in the catalog services, the product recommendations APIs from Adobe. And with that, the entire catalog, the micro site that we built, that commercial site that we built, has zero API calls into the Adobe Commerce back-end. So we're incredibly fast in that experience. We have sub-second low times on that catalog experience. And we don't have to worry about scalability or stability issues because the entire experience has run from the Edge using those scalable SaaS APIs. So we don't have any stability issues.

So we're running the homepage, we're running all of our blog content, we're running our store locator, our product listing pages, our product detail pages. They're all powered by Edge Delivery Services and those SaaS APIs. So it's giving us really fantastic performance. Our homepage, we're seeing 100 on our Lighthouse scores and we're loading in, I think it's 0.5 second, 0.7 second of that speed index for these pages. So with the need for greater content velocity as well, and spinning up new experiences and having those campaigns in mind, we're able to deliver a micro site in addition to the the commercial site there as well on Edge Delivery Services. So we leveraged the same block library, we leveraged the same code base, and we were able to spin up a new microsite in a matter of weeks instead of months that would've taken typically to set up microsites and push them live. And that's thanks to the DevOps pipeline that we had, the block library that we already had, and the flexibility that Fountain Tire have from a content management perspective. They're working SharePoint, they can push that content out themselves much faster than ever before.

The independence of content management was something that was important. It is something they'd relied on partners before previously to help them push out that content. It was a challenge. So now we're enabling Fountain Tire's team to be more agile, be more nimble, independent in the content management and curation of that overall experience. So with that in mind, we're seeing excellent performance across this site. And as we know, performance is key from a commerce experience. We know that speed performance has a direct correlation to key site metrics. Things like average order value, conversion rate, bounce rate, and overall customer satisfaction with our site.

So research from Google, from CloudFlare, from Econsultancy as well, they've shown that there's that direct relationship there.

If your site is loading in around five seconds, your bounce rate will be 35%, something in that area, right? As soon as we drop that page load time down to one second, our bounce rate drops to about 7%. So it's a massive change in just dropping a few seconds off that. Every second count, every millisecond counts when we're delivering our commerce experiences and Edge Delivery Services from Adobe is how we're tackling those challenges for the customers. I think it's very interesting because we all been part of multiple conferences and Keynote during the Summit, and we hear our content or customer experience orchestration is at the center of everything at Adobe. But I like what you're bringing here is this starts with the technical foundation and it start with metrics and performance metrics that are the key to provide this experience to the customer, right? So I think it's very interesting to tie these performance metrics and how they change the experience for the customers. But also, I think for Fountain Tire as well. Yeah. So I'd like to know from you, Stephanie, this transformation is choice to go with Edge Delivery Service. What benefits did you see within Fountain Tire and the organization out of it? - On the technical side-- - Yeah. It's fast. It's incredibly fast. We went from red circles of under 30 Lighthouse scores to green 100 circles, in the matter of the day that we launched it.

So definitely our technical performance, our SEO performance and our accessibility for sure. Also, I would say the biggest thing for our team is to be able to have a fast, well laid out, informative, great content website so that our sales team can be proud to be able to use it with customers. But then as marketers, our ability and the trust in being able to update it is we can make changes fast. We can work with our sales team, can you develop this? Can you change this? We can now do that ourselves. And that was part of our business case, is we wanted to bring it more internally and be less reliant on agencies to be able to manage the website at the speed that our business partners needed us to.

Looking at how, 'cause we run it off a SharePoint with democratized authorization and Word documents, which blows my mind still to this day.

To be able to show our stakeholders, like sit with them in a meeting and go, "Okay, you want this and you want this." And to be able to update it and show them and publish it right there in a meeting, like, our stakeholders now have trust in us that they never had before.

They have new ideas. They're coming forward, "Can we do this? Can we do that?" And stuff like that. So we've gained a lot of credibility within our teams. We have delivered more information and education as per our content strategy to our end customers. We've been able to show through analytics and whatnot that we're driving more traffic to our stores. We have 167 stores across Canada, and we have been able to say, "We drove these phone calls, these emails, these clicks for directions to show them, this is what this website is doing to drive traffic through your doors." So we didn't have those things before. So we went from a site that they were embarrassed about and wouldn't talk about to now they're giving us ideas. We can measure how it's impacting their business, and they're just part of the team now to make sure that we're consistently updating and delivering on new experiences. That's very interesting, and I like that when you have conferences like this, you hear the technical side, you hear the business side, you hear the value and the benefits and how it impacted different sections or segments of the business, and even your executives and your stakeholders that are not proud of what they're doing. But I like to put our customers and our teams on the spot a little bit. We talked about the eight weeks for the why and the discovery and gathering those requirements. What was the time to market to deploy the solution? - From discovery to deploy? - Yeah. We were less than six months, I believe. And did that include-- I think that was eight weeks of discovery, and then the rest was four months to delivering when we launched it. Do you want to add something this? No, it was three to four-month mark to get live post discovery, which is I think one of the fastest Adobe Commerce sites we've got up and running. That's from-- A ground up build from the commerce back-end to the front-end, everything was brand new. Yeah, up in three to four months. I had one thing to add is that in the whole process, both discovery and then also what we've gained from it, is including IT as a stakeholder and informing them of what the technical solution was and what it was going to deliver, the other thing we gained was a lot of confidence from our IT team and what we were going to build and deliver on, because we were in the-- We are still just about done. In the middle of an ERP project, there was a lot of, "Don't touch, we're busy, we can't get involved in this." So we only included them in what they needed to, but they had confidence in what the technical solution was. They had confidence in what it was going to do and how we were going to manage it. And we've gone from having change advisory boards for a button. We'd have to go through like a week long process to change a button previously to now they're like, "You're fine." Because it's decoupled, they're confident in the security, there's confident in the code.

That is a huge part that we've gained internally to go-to market and just that relationship we have with IT. That's very interesting that you're bringing IT and those parallels with other projects like ERP and everything that's going on. And it's going to bring me, like, if we do the math together, we talk about the eight weeks, the four months, about six months, and we're here today talking about it. So if we start tracking back and even there's the sales cycles and the decision process of choosing the technology. So that brings us back to early 2024. So I'm going to turn the question to you, Chris, is Edge Delivery Service, early 2024, brand new technology on the market. You are our VP Technology for all things commerce and digital experience in the Americas. What got you guys to select Edge Delivery Service as a solution? And what was the reasoning behind it? Timing. The timing was perfect for where we were at with the stage of this project. It was summer last year. We were just wrapping up our discovery and the big announcement of Edge was there. So as consultants, as engineers, as Valtech, we want to make sure that we're putting forward the right solution for our customers, not just for the short-term, not an interim solution, but setting up for long-term success. And because this is a multi-year transformation project, we wanted to make sure we're establishing that solid foundation on which we're building everything, not having to go down and refactor in 12 months or 24 months or something like that. So legacy development concepts with Adobe Commerce were legacy, right? We didn't want to be approaching that anymore, that monolithic style development, right? We didn't want to put that in place. So we wanted to give them the agility, again. But also from a cost and growth perspective, Edge really won out across the board. So we've developed an ROI calculator as well, which helps to go through and identify the uptake in conversion in order value in organic traffic as a result of performance. And that's one of the key areas of Edge Delivery is delivering that performance. So we can predict and we can show what the benefit's going to get of implementing a technology in that.

And while you said it was new at Summit, it had actually been around for about a year before Summit, but more in a simple approach. It wasn't as widely adopted, but Summit last year really put Edge Delivery Services in front of everybody with the integration to AEM, with Universal Editor and really brought it to the forefront. And it really established Edge Delivery Service as a key element of Adobe's unified content and commerce roadmap, right? So it wasn't a temporary solution. It was really foundational to how Adobe was evolving their content and commerce experiences. So we've been working for a few months on developing our expertise around Edge Delivery Service. We built out our acceleration. We'd enabled and trained up our developers prior to Summit. So we felt that we were in a really good position to make sure that we were skilled to be able to execute on a project. We don't want to go and recommend a technology that we don't know how to work with, right? We want to make sure that our developers, our solutions consultants know what they're talking about to be able to deliver that. So we'd gone through the process of R&D leading up to Summit, and we had a really good discussion with Fountain Tire at Summit last year around the adoption of this. And we demoed this solution to them, walked them through the process, how do I manage content? What do I get from that? And analyzing some of those pros and cons.

Part of the project was working with Adobe as well, to make sure that the solution was up-to-date. It was still in development, especially with the drop-ins, which powers product listing page, product detail page. So we're closely aligned with the Adobe product team to make sure that it is structured in a way and set up that we can actually deliver for Fountain Tire. So that was a really good relationship we had there.

But we could also see that the evolution of Adobe Commerce was really moving in this direction, right? They had a renewed focus on Adobe Commerce.

So moving to this Edge Delivery really made a lot of sense at the time. Overall, there's been a shift to composable architectures across the board. We've seen multiple technologies adopting this kind of concepts. And Adobe has really revolutionized their platforms to make sure that they're fitting in with this modern approach to delivering content and commerce, which is great. So we have App Builder, we have the SaaS API. We have all these new things that are available in this headless storefront.

We could see that Adobe's moving forward towards this SaaS approach to how we're delivering out of process extensibility, moving code out of that core platform as well. And with this decision that we made 12 months ago to adopt Edge Delivery Service, go that decoupled front-end, we're now really well positioned to move into the next phase of this project and start to adopt cloud, right? This new product that you saw announced this week, we've already been looking into this and planning out a future phase to move across onto this cloud service technology. The great thing here is the front-end is completely reusable. So we've set up the project. Because of this decision we made 12 months ago, we've set this project up for long-term success to be able to take on and adopt these revolutionary technology changes from Adobe. We can leverage App Builder to handle our integrations. We didn't do a lot of PHP code development in this initial phase as well. So we don't have to go and refactor the back-end. The entire front-end is used across this new SaaS platform as well. So that was really important to establish that long-term success. That's amazing. I'm throwing you off script and asking you a little follow up question because I find very, very interesting is that was 12 months ago. Now we're there. We talked about the importance of performance score. We saw what Edge did, and let's be honest, you have a very agnostic approach because you cover multiple side, multiple verticals, multiple technologies. On a strategic standpoint, in my role, I have a lot of conversation with our clients and multiple people in the industry about the future-proofing of technology. How do you feel that Edge Delivery Service fair in terms of future-proofing a year in right now? And do you still think today that it's still the right choice? 100%. I am a massive proponent of Edge Delivery Service. I'm taking it to multiple customers. I've had conversations about adopting Edge Delivery Service, not just with Adobe Commerce or Experience Manager, but across other competing commerce platforms, right? To improve the content workflows that customers are seeing with Edge, to improve that front-end performance as well. We see with the release of Commerce Optimizer, Adobe are thinking exactly the same thing, right? Edge is so powerful that it shouldn't be exclusive to just the Adobe Commerce, but any commerce platform should be able to adopt this technology and we're really seeing benefits of it. That's very interesting.

Thank you guys for opening like this to the strategic transformation and the tech part and the success and the benefits you saw in the business. So we covered the why. We covered the how. I like in conferences like this and maybe different than others that you've seen. I'd like to to strip the facade and maybe go into the strategic partnership and open the good, the bad and the ugly that we learn from sometimes, because at the end of the day, transformation like this, they're successful because of the partnership that you foster and that you do with your client or with your vendors, right? - Yeah. - With your partners. So I think that should be the next section. And for you, Stephanie, the question I have is, what made Valtech the partner that you decided to go with, and how different was it with other vendors that you might have had in the past? And I know you've been in the digital transformation...

Sphere for a long time. And maybe how was it different than others and what made it successful? - That's a lot of questions. - Yeah. I'll start with who we are, 'cause that as the front-end of it, because that explains a lot.

Who we are is a tire and automotive service, we are 50/50 partners with those 167 local stores. And so partnership really is a foundational hub, key word for us. We are partners together as associates, partners with our stores. We are partners financially with Goodyear. We are also partners with the vendors that we do business with. So partnership is important. We have to have shared values, we have to have a common vision and we have to work well together. Okay. Having fun is one part of our characteristics. So we like to have a little fun with our partners as well.

So when we were going through the business process, some of it had been done before I joined Fountain Tire, 'cause I came from another organization.

When we were sitting down between the Adobe Platform with Valtech versus another competing platform with a different integrator, going through it, there's, obviously, capabilities, approach. What does the integration or the development process look like? How involved are you? What do you do if you need to make changes? And stuff like that. So we needed to make sure that that fit felt okay, because sometimes, it's hands off and you don't have much control, and then sometimes you're in the weeds. So it also needed to be right for our small but mighty team.

It also needed to be flexible and approached. So when we were going through discovery, we decided to adopt a crawl, walk, run approach, which was what we brought to the table through the process.

We appreciated...

The strategic consultancy coming back and more asking questions. We've talked to a couple people, and we were talking earlier, is...

As a client, you never want to feel like you're sold to. It just always just makes my skin crawls. I don't want to feel sold to. I want to feel that I've been given a choice, informed, given options and what would be best and stuff like that. And so we needed to have a vendor that made us feel like that, that listened and gave us choices. And then it was still our decision.

Cost and approach and flexibility, definitely cost as well. But through the process, one of the things that working with Valtech stood out was I'd never had a vendor ask so many times, "Did we hear you correctly? We heard you say this. Did we get all of your questions? Can we answer any more questions?" And that was multiple steps throughout both RFP phase, discovery phase, and even implementation phase. So I can't think that there was very many points where I didn't feel that the team you were working with didn't understand exactly what we were going after and what was going on. So that's huge to a partnership.

And then we were on time and we followed the timelines. We were on budget and stuff like that. And that builds trust within an organization.

Because this is a multi-year, multi-website, multi-customer experience project, it gained a lot of trust internally with Fountain Tire, with both our executive, our IT department, our internal stakeholders and whatnot, that what we were doing was really going to help them deliver. And we were all going to get what we were seeking out of it. So that partnership has been instrumental, but it also, it's who we are.

Partnership is a big part of Fountain Tire. Very interesting. Thank you for saying this. And I think that at the end of the day, we have to understand that when a vendor goes and help like this, delivery is our currency, right? It's how we deliver and it's in time, on budget and all that. But the reality is it's you, Chris, and your team that has to make sure that this happens in terms of technology and implementation and discovery. So the question I have for you is, how did you make sure-- We hear all these things, but how did you make sure that the technology selected and the process was seamlessly integrating with their ecosystem, their needs, their ERP transformation that was ongoing at the same time? So how do you ensure that what that you just mentioned happened? So when we started this project, it was really that light brochure catalog style website that there wasn't a heavy reliance on downstream systems at the time. But we wanted to make sure that we were setting up for long-term success in the decisions we were making in our solution design. And even 12 months ago, we knew that D365 transition was happening, that ERP transition was happening. So we were setting up the right tooling, the right processes in place to make sure that we'll be able to integrate to that when it was ready to come live. So...

The flexibility in the authoring options, with Edge Delivery Services, we have the ability to select how we want to develop our content, whether it's document-based authoring through Google Drive or SharePoint, or with AEM and Universal Editor. And Fountain Tire being a Microsoft organization, we're able to leverage SharePoint to set up that content authoring option. So simplifies a setup of that SharePoint repository, but also simplifies the onboarding of users into the authoring environment, right? They don't have to go and understand and access a different environment. They're already set up with their Microsoft account. They're already in SharePoint. So you can easily just control access to who has right permissions on certain documents within that authoring environment.

But now that we're embarking on that second phase of the project, we're adding transactional elements to the site with B2C, B2B capabilities. So now we have to consider-- Oh, now we have to implement that integration down to D365. And one of the advantages that we have with Adobe Commerce and App Builder is there is a integration starter kit available for D365 F&O. So it gives us an acceleration into integrating to those systems. And that's one of the key things that we have with App Builder, is that we have some pre-built workflows, some pre-built integrations that we can use as a starting point, and then natively integrate it to Adobe Commerce as well. The great thing about using something like App Builder as well is that all of our custom development is done outside of the commerce platform. So we don't have to go in and modify any of that core code. We don't have to write PHP code and deploy that anymore. We write our integrations, we write our extensibility within that App Builder environment, and that's available directly into D365, or we're able to expose additional Fountain Tire services through the API Mesh into the front-end. So we have things like our tire and fitment APIs that are going to be available. We also have booking and appointments capabilities for a third-party service, and we're able to handle the integration through the API Mesh and App Builder functionality that Adobe Commerce and Adobe gives us. So we don't, again, do that core customization that increases complexity on commerce platforms, but also increases total cost of ownership with the maintenance and upgrades and that kind of stuff. So switching to this composable architecture, we have these microservice-based integrations that give us more agility and maintenance of those and reduce our overall total cost of ownership. And again, because of this decision we made 12 months ago to go with Edge, we're future-proofing the integration to these additional systems, right? And we're future-proofing the move to something like a cloud service by not doing the development directly in that core technology anymore using App Builder and API Mesh and Edge. I like that it also, like you say, it helps to build upon something and build those blocks as it over time, so you don't have to wait until everything is ready or perfect to start the project. Which brings me to the-- I want to piggyback on this, Steph, is by doing this, and I know you mentioned earlier quickly that there was an ERP implementation that was ongoing.

What got you guys to decide to not wait until all those third-party features or those commerce features or e-com features were ready to be rolled out because of your technical ecosystem and modernization that you were doing? What got you to decide to start right away with content and build upon it versus waiting and doing it all in one shot? The business couldn't wait. Like, the business couldn't go two years without updating a commercial website. The business couldn't go without us getting ready to update our retail website. We would lose sales. We had further degradation of trust within our business and with our store partners and whatnot.

From a marketer and business decision, that part was easy because we would lose out to our competitors and we would just lose business period. So when we were starting the RFP and discovery process, like at a table, we're like, "Why don't we just start with content first? We can get everything ready. We don't have to have a lot of integration or reliance on IT and all that," because they were very busy and they were like, "We can't help with that." So let's start with the content first, which is mostly on the marketing team on our vendor side. And then we'll be more ready. We're about to launch our ERP in six weeks, and that's going to enable us to be able to go further farther because of all of the stuff that comes with it. So now we've gotten all of that foundational work done and all of that laid out, now we can start to build on it.

And we're further faster. So easy answer, we just couldn't wait. The business would lose out. That's a good reason. That's a good reason.

What does the future hold for Fountain Tire? Now I know you're rolling out your ERP in six weeks. We have all those commerce enterprise features building on this composable and decoupled environment. What does the future hold in terms of your roadmap with Adobe and in your whole tech organization? Next step is our retail website. And so we're going to bring over the retail website with all of the-- It has more sticky integrations that we need to put into it. So the retail website, we're building out portals, so portals for both B2C and B2B where customers can access information, where they can transact, where they can connect with either stores or sales associates and whatnot. So portals is going to be a big part. We also have a wholesale division and they're already on a different system we'll bring over into Adobe, but they already have integrated procurement and punch up models and stuff like that. So we're going to bring them in last after we build out all of the foundation for portals. So then all of our businesses will be on the Adobe platform and we'll have enhanced experiences for that. The next step is we're working on CRM and marketing automation. But after that, we also want to work on a customer experience where within those portals and that Adobe environment, how can we service more on the B2B side? How can we service them in the moments of truth, like after our service or onsite maintenance and stuff like that? So if we can work with the portal and the tools and deliver on an experience within this platform to be able to manage that with them, that will be a huge game changer.

And then after that, we also have like a telephony customer contact part.

What else am I missing? Those are the big things that are coming up for us. That's a massive undertaking. That's great. There's a few things. Yeah. Chris, I have a question. You mentioned earlier put a team in-- And a lot of people here heard it in Summit, that Adobe Commerce is going from a PaaS to a SaaS service. You've embarked on the technology strategy leadership in this project 12 months ago with Edge Delivery Service. How do you see this roadmap that Stephanie just mentioned and this new discussion that we're having at Summit right now about going into a SaaS model for Adobe? Do you foresee any technical data? What will be your approach to comment on that? Yeah, so moving to the new Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service is going to be quite simple for Fountain Tire, which is, again, because of that decision we made so long ago...

Using that decoupled frontend. It's not like we have any monolithic frontend experiences that would be deprecated or removed as part of this. We did handle that from a future-proofing perspective. And again, from that initial build phase, we really focused on low level of customization, using out-of-the-box functionality, not introducing too much custom code, too much development, too much technical debt there.

And yeah, we've really set up for success there. The other advantage is we've started to adopt App Builder for customization. So instead of, again, using PHP code in the core that has to be deployed into that past environment, anything we develop and customize within App Builder is future-proofed into that new SaaS technology because it's using those events, it's using those web hooks. They can just move across to that new platform, which is excellent for us. That's amazing. Thank you for clarifying this. I think it's very useful information.

I think through this discussion. So again, if I wrap up, we understood what made this strategic partnership successful, the transformation, the future-proofing Edge Delivery, how it applies into a digital roadmap that you guys have, and how you iterated this crawl, walk, run, but I applied for you and your reality. I would enable your marketing team as well. And maybe on that, Stephanie, we could do like a final word, all of us, and then move on to questions. In terms of operational efficiency and what you saw 'cause it's great you've talked about the IT and the side, like, how all this enable your team to be more efficient and operationally efficient in the e-com and marketing side. And also, if you have a last word for the audience before we move on to questions.

It's fast, it's clean. We have the trust of our teams, we can now take more control of our own. - Yeah. - Domains and stuff like that.

And we can go farther faster. And it's going to be easy to go farther faster. If I was to just put it in a few words, clean, fast, easy, flexible. That's great. Chris.

I mean, for me, working with Fountain Tire has been absolute pleasure, right? Everyone I've worked with at Fountain Tire has been amazing. The conversations we had last year at Summit again this year at Summit and everything in between. Their enthusiasm they have for the transformation is amazing, but also their willingness to adopt these new technologies. Even though they are relatively new, they're seeing the benefit of adopting them now and integrating them into that multi-year roadmap. So I think the enthusiasm that Fountain Tire have to work on this project has been great. That's amazing. And I think guys, like you saw the title of this panel being Driving Retail Innovation with Fountain Tire, I hope that you saw how Edge Delivery Service was really capturing the innovation part and the future-proofing into a technology foundation that really ensures this customer experience orchestration that Adobe is talking about. And also, I must say just to be a bit cheeky, but I think it's interesting. There's something that is interesting is for Fountain Tire, we're talking about all the different branches and the franchisees and how you work into this partnership. There's a slogan that you guys have and that is, we're on this road together. And I think that it's really something that we have to understand and make sure when you undertake such a big transformation with a new tech that's only a few years old. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - It's all right.

[Music]