Tech Structure

You can't have NEXT without product, so we need the Product team to deliver the tech that allows our inhouse product department to design, plan and deliver exciting NEXT/Lipsy ranges for our customers via our extensive portfolio of stores and our outstanding website. Their focus = real time data through all our systems processes. This will mean that we can help the business get our new products and services a lot quicker to market and available to our customers. The Product team are also on the journey from on premise to new exciting innovative solutions in the cloud.

TECH:
Microsoft C# / .NET Framework / .NET Core, Event Streaming (Kafka, Event streaming bus), Containerisation (Kubernetes/Docker), Cloud technologies (Azure), Restful API’s and Microservices. SQL  Server and no-SQL databases, Git, Agile & Scrum, Cloud and On-Prem environments

Our eCommerce websites and apps have grown steadily over the past 10 years to become one of the largest online retail platforms in the UK.  We currently sell to 70 international markets, offering our 6 million active customers a personalised shopping experience and the ability to purchase from a wide range of products using multiple delivery methods and payment types. eCommerce is the biggest department at NEXT and is based across multiple sites and countries, working across development, testing, support, architecture and more to keep ourselves ahead of the pack.

TECH:
Lots! Primarily we tend to use the Microsoft Technology Stack - C#, .NET Core, Web API, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, Azure Dev Ops, Xamarin.  As well as, React, HTML5, CSS3, Node.js and many javascript libraries to help us build well designed customer-facing User Interfaces. We’ve recently started on our journey with Kubernetes and Docker, and we host all of the these things in Azure. 

Our huge warehouse estate in Yorkshire is held together by the Warehouse team, the warehouses have an enormous amount of tech that allow us to receive, store, pick and pack items for our customers - handling everything from socks to sofas, dresses to microwaves! The Warehouse team focuses heavily on automation which includes 40 miles of conveyor linking everything together across our sites, hundreds of storage and picking robots - a very fast moving, continuously changing part of NEXT Technology!

TECH:
Microsoft C# / .NET Framework / .NET Core, Event Streaming (Kafka, Event streaming bus), Containerisation (Kubernetes/Docker), Cloud technologies (Azure or AWS), Restful API’s and Microservices. RF handsets, SQL  Server and no-SQL databases, Git, Agile & Scrum

The CCX team develop and support both bespoke hand-crafted applications as well as industry leading off-the-shelf packages that help NEXT provide great customer service. Available to help our customers in whichever way they find most convenient whether it be by phone, email, live chat, apps or web!

TECH:
Predominantly use C# .Net, MVC & Web API, SQL, HTML Javascript, JQuery, Visual Studio, Version control such as GIT, TFS. Also use VB Script, .NET Core. Javascript frameworks such as Angular, Vue. Debugging tools like Fiddler, Postman. IBM Mainframe technologies too 

NEXT has been known for years now for it's credit offering and the success of that is down to the Finance team keeping our a 2 billion pound platform modern, fit for purpose and secure! Our primary credit product, NEXTPay, is entirely in-house written and our alternative product NEXT3Step is operated on bespoke 3rd Party software tightly integrated into our own systems. The Finance team plays an important part in helping the business grow in the UK and beyond, continually adding new payment types and countries in the fast moving world of payments which is driven by consumer demand around the world!

TECH:
Microsoft .NET Framework .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, C#, Microsoft SQL Server 2012+,TSQL, GIT,Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) / Azure DevOps,MVC,WCF,WEB API, JavaScript,JQuery, Bootstrap 

NEXT currently has just over 500 stores and we have the Store team to thank for all of the software and latest features that our customers and store colleagues have access to! A short while ago we had a complete overhaul of the store software and hardware across all of our store estate which gives us a fantastic platform to build upon.  It means that we are able to provide incredible value to the business and continually get projects out the door in impressive timescales using our 4 agile development teams.  We are now starting to implement cloud infrastructure alongside our traditional infrastructure and we have a very exciting roadmap for the future including collecting all RFID information from stores, return lockers and allowing stores to take transactions on mobile Android devices!

TECH:
Microsoft .NET Framework, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, C#, Microsoft SQL Server 2012+, Xamarin and Android development, Azure cloud, SOA and Microservices, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), MVC, MVVM(WPF), JavaScript, Dappe.

Stock & Pricing are pivotal to ensuring our fantastic products are always available, both in our stores and for online customers.  S&P support our Merchandisers by making sure that the right stock is in the right place across our UK high street, Lipsy, our international franchise stores and for our online customers. They do all of this whilst working to modernise our solutions onto new technologies and redesigning our complex legacy systems into modern new architecture.

TECH:
MVS z/OS IBM Mainframe development using COBOL with DB2, Natural, Adabas and JCL.  We also develop in MVC and JavaScript. Microsoft C# / .NET Framework, SQL  Restful API’s, Git, Agile & Scrum. We are also looking to introduce Event Streaming (Kafka, Event streaming bus) and Microservices.

At the heart of NEXT we have the HR team supporting all of head office, retail and our warehouses - that's over 50,000 people! Oracle was introduced to support such a large and growing workforce and will ensure that our people continue to be at the heart of NEXT by ensuring we have the software we need to develop current talent, attract new talent to join us as well as the oh so important payroll aspects!

TECH:
Microsoft .NET Framework .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, C#, Microsoft SQL Server 2012+,TSQL, GIT,Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) / Azure DevOps,MVC,WCF,WEB API, JavaScript,JQuery, Bootstrap 

Infrastructure and Cloud Services are at the forefront of everything from Cloud to Networking, Data Centres to virtual servers/servers (Windows and Linux) as well as desktops, Licensing and mobile phones!  Every piece of infrastructure at Head office, in the stores, the warehouses, for the website or the contact centre are supported by this area. Central services such as Microsoft Azure, GSuite and GCP, file services, Citrix, Active Directory (and much more) are all provided and supported by this area.

TECH:
Azure DevOps, Azure Foundations and Scaffolding, Azure IaaS and PaaS, Azure Networking, Azure Active Directory, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, Azure Migrate, Server 2012/2016, AD, DNS, DHCP, Cisco, PowerShell, Terraform, Bash, SCCM, SCOM, Windows/Linux, Netscaler, Nginx, VMWare, Hyper-V

Computer Services are the backbone of support for ALL colleagues across NEXT underpinning both the business and NEXT Tech. They consist of the 1st line central support team's, Data Access, Service Management, alongside looking after our Centrally managed environments - the lot! They also look after some of the lesser known areas of NEXT Tech such as essential communications, managed print and reprographics

TECH:
Mainframe, SQL, TFS, active batch ServiceNow, IBM's Watson campaign and customer automation, EngageOne 

Business Intelligence work with Finance, Product, Warehouse, Marketing, the Brand teams, almost everyone to design and build the data solutions that Next relies on to measure, report and analyse the performance of the business and its operations. We are SQL at heart but embracing new tech to modernise the platform and really are leading the charge toward platform modernisation and have already developed live solutions in Azure whilst migrating our on premise systems to Azure with ambitions to be fully cloud based.

TECH:
Microsoft BI stack: SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS; Microsoft Azure: Data Lake, Data Bricks, Data Factory, Synapse, SQL MI, SQL DB, SQL Pools, PowerBI, HD Insights, ML / AI, Additional tech: Kafka, Streaming, Event Hubs, No SQL, Google BIG Query, Active Batch; Plus: Dimensional modelling, Agile & Scrum, Data Ops, Cloud and on Prem solutions

And last but by no means least - Information Security! NEXT has made headlines for all the right reasons but you'll never catch us in a quandary over security. Retail is now one of the most targeted industry verticals in Cyber Security, we face a constantly changing threat landscape ranging from script kiddies to APT’s that are directly or indirectly targeting our software and data.  We have a huge online presence and large retail estate which we have to protect against these threats and so it is important we have the people and technology to rise to this challenge! 

TECH:
We work with some marketing leading technologies such as SIEM, Firewalls, Endpoint Detection and Response, DLP, Web Application Firewalls, and Vulnerability Scanning.

The architecture team work across all of NEXT Tech, bringing together our business and technology teams to achieve our business objectives in the most efficient and cost effective manner.  We do this through collaboration; Google Spaces for adhoc conversations,  structured meetings such as the Architecture Centre of Excellence to manage cross domain issues,  Principles and Roadmaps to provide a common understanding of NEXT Technology, and lightweight processes, we follow the 'Release Early, Release Often' model as we build our working practices and methods.