Lingerie and adult toys retailer Ann Summers completed a major overhaul of its enterprise integration architecture in partnership with PMC 18 months ago, and the business is now looking at a future no longer restrained by long-legacy systems and software.
Its legacy enterprise service bus (ESB) environment was replaced by PMC’s Graphene platform, modernising more than 100 integrations and laying foundations for future marketplace growth and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, among other tech-led strategies. In the words of the company’s technology and supply chain director Jeannette Copeland, Ann Summers had got to the point with IT and digital infrastructure where it was “continually building on top of things”.
“And that gets to the stage where you’re almost building on top of sand…we got to the point where we needed to dig in and change that,” she explains.
But while the technology story is transformative for Ann Summers, the lessons learned during the move to reverse engineer old systems and replace the ESB over a nine-month period may be even more valuable for retailers facing similar challenges.
Lesson 1: Don’t wait until you’re building on sand
The catalyst for the project was a familiar retail problem. Over time, new systems, new channels and new business requirements had been layered onto existing infrastructure. The result was an increasingly complex integration landscape that had become difficult to manage and expensive to maintain.
The challenge is one many retailers recognise. New marketplaces appear, new customer experience tools emerge and new payment methods need integrating, but rather than replacing underlying architecture, businesses often add another connection, another workaround or another piece of middleware.
Copeland describes how Ann Summers had a relatively small internal team supporting the previous environment and staff departures created a growing knowledge gap over time.
This is a challenge facing many mature retail organisations. Systems often outlive the people who originally implemented them. Documentation becomes outdated, processes evolve without being recorded and, eventually, businesses become dependent on institutional memory.
For Ann Summers, this became a significant factor in its decision to partner with PMC. Rather than owning every aspect of the integration architecture internally, Copeland wanted responsibility for documentation, maintenance, and platform evolution to sit with a specialist partner. She describes it as “a black box” that can connect internal and third-party systems together.
Ann Summers reached the point where it needed to address a tech complexity problem directly, replacing a legacy integration environment that had become increasingly difficult to support and evolve.
Lesson 2: Give yourself more time than you think you need
Copeland says of the project: “First, the timelines were incredibly ambitious, we had too little contingency time.”
The original ambition was to complete the work, which began in March 2024, before that year’s peak trading. Although the system was operational by October, the programme was not fully complete and additional work continued beyond the initial go-live period.
As a result, the team had to rethink delivery plans, split work into minimum viable product phases and introduce temporary manual processes where automation could not be delivered on schedule.
“If we had all the time, money and people in the world, [we] would have approached it really differently,” says Copeland.
Instead, the business had to adapt throughout delivery, staging elements of the roll-out and continuing work during peak trading. The experience underlines a recurring truth about major transformation programmes: complexity is usually underestimated. And that challenge becomes even greater considering the integration layer touches virtually every function, from e-commerce and finance to fulfilment and customer service.
“Taking it over the line, we had board sponsorship, so the sponsorship was from the top down,” she says, adding that the board established a pragmatic approach to risk. “We were prepared to pause the project if it wasn’t going to be achievable.”
That flexibility proved valuable during difficult moments when leadership teams had to assess whether to continue or temporarily halt progress. The presence of executive support provided both confidence and clarity.
Copeland recalls receiving one particularly simple instruction from the boardroom regarding project risk: “The only real caveat that I had from the CEO was not to break the business.”
Her comments capture an important reality. Transformation programmes often succeed not because risk disappears, but because organisations align around acceptable risk and create governance structures capable of managing it.
Lesson 4: People will underestimate how hard transformation really is
One of Copeland’s most revealing observations had little to do with technology – instead, it concerned human expectations. Reflecting on the programme, she says: “I knew how big and tricky it would be.”
She repeatedly prepared colleagues about the scale and complexity involved. Yet, she believes many people still failed to grasp what the project would actually feel like. “I know that I said those words, but I don’t think everyone understood how difficult it would be because they’ve just never been through those things.”
We were prepared to pause the project if it wasn’t going to be achievable Jeannette Copeland, Ann Summers
The challenge wasn’t simply technical complexity, it was the breadth of impact across the organisation. The ESB connected systems across the entire business, and teams were required to support project activity while continuing their day-to-day responsibilities. Additional resources were required, priorities shifted and pressure increased.
“It was the number of plates that we had spinning,” says Copeland, adding that a key challenge was then keeping everyone aligned and focused as intensity ramped up. “Even though you think you’ve told people [how difficult transformation will be], you need to find a way to make them feel it before they really have to feel it.”
Change management, therefore, isn’t simply about communication. It’s about creating realistic expectations about workload, disruption and organisational impact, although Copeland acknowledges she doesn’t have the answer to preparing retail organisations for such an overhaul of critical infrastructure.
Lesson 5: Technical debt never disappears
Although the migration delivered a new platform foundation, Copeland is realistic about the idea of ever reaching a finished state. Because documentation was incomplete and timelines were compressed, some elements of the existing environment had to be moved through a “lift-and-shift” approach, she notes.
As a result, not everything was optimised immediately. Instead, Ann Summers and PMC continue addressing technical debt as part of ongoing development work.
“When we’re touching a part that we’ve not optimised, or if we’ve got some spare capacity, we will take a look at some of that technical debt,” says Copeland. “It’ll never really end though, right? Because technical debt always exists, it’s just how old your technical debt is.”
Lesson 6: Focus on foundations
Although the original business case at Ann Summers was broader than to support AI strategy and integration, the transformation has become increasingly relevant in that regard as the wider retail world continues to explore AI-driven discovery, customer experiences and operational automation at pace.
Ann Summers’ marketplace strategy was one driver behind the programme. As a retailer of adult products, online discoverability challenges have encouraged the company to expand through marketplaces and third-party channels. Supporting those ambitions required a more flexible integration architecture.
At the same time, Copeland has been clear that AI ambitions depend on getting the fundamentals right. “Unless you’ve got your data straightened out, it can hold you back,” she says. “We are trying to ensure we’ve got foundations in our data so we can scale in the future, and that we’ve got options so we don’t find ourselves in a technical corner.”
The new platform is already helping Ann Summers deliver richer customer service experiences by bringing together data from multiple systems and surfacing more contextual information for agents handling customer enquiries.
Lesson 7: Have a North Star
When it comes to tech transformation, Copeland points to the importance of having a clear objective and to communicate that organisation-wide: “It’s incredibly important to know what your North Star is and to make that visible, consumable and accessible to everybody.”
For Ann Summers, that North Star was simplification, but the “why?” can also be tailored to each different area of the business so it becomes a constant reminder of why they need to participate in – and be disrupted by – the transformation.
The goal was not simply replacing an ESB. It was creating a foundation that would make future integrations easier, reduce dependency on fragile legacy architecture and provide greater flexibility for growth. That objective helped teams navigate difficult periods and maintain focus when challenges emerged, Copeland adds. Technology transformation is rarely about technology alone, with success depending on people, governance, expectations, partnerships and a clear understanding of why the work matters.
With a new ESB in place, Ann Summers data and critical business information is more accessible. And the foundations the retailer has built now give it confidence it can play a more proactive role in a fast-changing retail/consumer environment and take on new channels and fresh opportunities as and when they arise.
