A feast of delicious looking foods.

This is not just software
This is Pivale software

with M&S

M&S are perhaps the most well known and trusted retailer in the UK specialising in clothing, homewares and luxury food products since 1884.
M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet Document Store page on an Apple MacBook.

A growing relationship

Having worked with M&S on previous projects, it was our pleasure to accept the major undertaking of developing a brand new, critical piece of software to supersede their older system.

M&S Food Technical Centre required a system to support their operations and interactions with suppliers and auditors.

Quote

Connect has been a great success. It is software that is intuitive with clear codes of practice... and it affords us better management of our contact lists with clarity on when updates take place as emails go directly to suppliers.

Claire Hughes - Head of Central Technology at M&S.
— Claire Hughes, Head of Central Technology, M&S
M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet Home page on an Apple MacBook and Document Store on an iPhone.

The requirements

The web software needed to encompass multiple applications including:

  • A document library
  • A complex database of organisations and users
  • Form submissions and tasks management
  • Custom audit control processes
  • Nutritional benchmarking
  • Bespoke Excel and on screen reports
M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet Home page on an Apple iPad.

The solutions

The solutions we provided include:

  • We had a series of discovery workshops with the client to determine the key areas of the project and identify goals
  • We created a content strategy to define what new data structures should exist to allow for rich linking of content
  • We proposed a phased delivery of the website application based on priorities
  • We took the previous system's raw data and created several algorithms to transform the data into the new data structures
  • We iterated through some design prototypes to arrive at a consensus for the site templates and user journeys
  • The client partnered with us as we built the system functionality, testing the various components as they were delivered in order to validate their effectiveness in addressing each of the business cases
  • We demoed critical functionality early, and continually so we could make amendments as we progressed
  • The initial application was launched in January 2015 and continues to be extended as M&S's requirements evolve
M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet Document Store on an Apple MacBook and Home page on an iPhone.

Analysis

As we started to analyse the requirements, we realised that there were going to be a lot of different user journeys through the application. So the first step was to design a stripped back and minimal interface with plenty of opportunity for expansion, to give us a good basis for future flexibility.

Our designer Darren came up with an icon set which clearly defined each area. This helped to visually represent which part of the application the user was in and the necessary tasks that could be carried out.

M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet Home page on an Apple MacBook and Document Store on an iPhone.

Design

We created a set of "style tiles" which clearly defined how buttons, boxes and form elements should look. This meant that as the project grew the design could fit all aspects of the content of each section.

M&S were immediately taken with our design presentation so we set to work on coding the interface in a responsive way so that it was usable and beautiful on a variety of device displays such as tablets, mobile phones and laptops as well as desktop screens.

M&S: Food Tech Connect Extranet on an Apple iMac, a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone.

Launch

M&S Connect launched in January 2015 and continues to be actively developed by Pivale as new requirements arise.

The system as a whole has been met with praise from its users (auditors both internal and external to M&S, food technicians and supply organisations) and has led to other ideas from team leaders at M&S to add complementary new functionality to the initial build.

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The Pivale team, from left to right - Adam Keywood, Daniel Johnson, Barry Fisher, Darren Fisher, Pri Scarabelli and Jules Manning.

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