Challenge

Starting with M&Ms, Mars looked to move towards MACH architecture for three main reasons. Firstly, they found that their M&M’s brand was looking too siloed, with their own retail and physical teams operating differently from those in third-party distributors like supermarkets. Secondly, the onset of Covid 19 meant that they wanted to go direct to consumers in a way that could scale across the Mars portfolio. Finally, aging applications and the accumulation of technical debts meant it was time to rebuild their architecture.

DTC and DTB business lines were either isolated or non-existent and revenue was underwhelming. Traditional monolithic systems forced simplification of customers’ experiences, made it hard to innovate, and weren’t cost-effective.

Ultimately, they needed a new solution that used best-of-breed, decentralized technologies that would allow them to go to market much more quickly – all while presenting a case for its scalability across Mars’ portfolio.

The MACH Approach

With an eye on scaling upwards throughout the Mars portfolio, the team at M&Ms established a cloud-native digital MACH architecture and embraced composable philosophies from the get-go.

The full change was substantial, implementing a full-portfolio solution all at once, instead of slower, incremental change. M&Ms, operating in the 15 biggest countries, enacted composable principles with certified MACH partners, commercetools, Amplience, Edgio, AWS, MACH Composer, TreasureData, Klaviyo, Dynatrace, Solace, Apollo, and Adyen.

Built around Mars’ wider business objectives but focused on M&M’s, the platform acts as a business accelerator that offers faster time to innovation for DTC and B2B strategies. Factoring in anticipated multi-brand scenarios allowed for data points such as inventory, delivery status, etc., to be democratized and digital-services-ready.

This data is exchanged through an event architecture via Commercetools and cloud-native AWS services, and through API orchestration Mars can now deliver real-time self-service experiences. A digital architecture built around the business, the architecture helps realize the promise of a unified, composable platform.

Due to an Open-Source orchestration foundation that runs throughout Mars, they have 100% composability, with 100% isolation by brand through a multi-tenancy strategy. This means that the ability and add other brands to this architecture is built-in by design. By seamlessly onboarding new brands using a reference app approach, this enabled teams to work through multiple crises such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, where a large team is based.

The MACH Approach yielded immediate success across multiple KPIs. The conversion rate increased by over 15% year on year and the average order value (AOV) increased by 4.5% over the same time. NPS scores rose and anecdotal customer feedback about CX continues to impress.