Press Release: MACH Alliance Announces Winners of the MACH Impact Awards 2023

The second annual awards program highlights the most globally innovative tech projects that utilize a MACH strategy

14 June 2023 - San Francisco - New York - London - Amsterdam - Berlin - MACH Alliance, the not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems, announced today the nine winners of the MACH Impact Awards, which were presented at MACH TWO in Amsterdam at an awards ceremony last night.

This is the second year the Alliance has hosted the awards program. Almost 150 entries were submitted with a significant increase in submissions for non-commerce categories showing that MACH is moving more and more beyond retail.

Open to any business across the globe, the MACH Impact Awards aim to raise awareness of the difference MACH-led projects are making in solving complex technical problems and creating measurable business value. Nominations were evaluated by a panel of 17 independent judges including MACH practitioners, industry analysts and journalists. Each award was judged on the project outcomes using MACH technologies to achieve or exceed objectives.

The winners are:

Best Retail Project: John Lewis Partnership

John Lewis Partnership has built an industry leading digital cloud platform which has enabled them to move away from an on-premise monolith. They completed the migration ahead of Black Friday and Christmas trading in 2022, with measurable uptime of above 99.9% through the peak period and no customer-impacting incidents during rollout. They have a platform and set of services that enables them to iterate quickly to build their omni-channel vision, moving from 10 releases to 16,000 last year, while building a thriving engineering community.

Best B2B Project: MKM Building Supplies

MKM Building Supplies demonstrated impressive business outcomes from their MACH project including faster UX, more products, better personalization, four-times monthly revenue and growth from 700-1,500 new accounts per month. They also reported higher Average Order Value than the project goal and improved Net Promoter Score.

Best Digital Experience: Paul Smith

Paul Smith began its MACH journey with the front-end, replacing multiple monolithic platforms with certified MACH solutions to deliver a new digital shopping experience. Just eight weeks after going live, revenue from search was up by 74%, ecommerce conversion was up by 31% and per session value was up by 26%. The judging panel said they showed impressive metrics and a good incremental approach to MACH migration, making a perfect hedge against a back-end that was aging.

Best Health/Pharma Project: Thommen Medical

Thommen Medical has seen material impact to its business as a result of going composable. The company created a self-service dental implants platform on an international scale with a 40% increase in adoption in the first two months. And today, 50% of orders are placed on a mobile device, which wasn’t possible before. The outcome for the business is clear in the adoption numbers, and the scalability of the MACH-based solution is even more impressive.

Best Hospitality Project: Just Eat Takeaway

Just Eat Takeaway built a cart and order solution that has gone live in 24 countries, delivering workflow flexibility and a flexible data model that means products, services and digital goods can all be sold on the same platform. They reported a 75% increase in the number of orders received through the platform, and a 20% increase in order value.

Best Overall Change Project: American Bath Group

American Bath Group faced numerous pain points formerly with its all-in-one DXP, creating limitations from agility to vendor lock-in. They demonstrated good planning around MACH and how to shape adoption and roadmap stages. Through the project, the company streamlined the onboarding of new brands, which will positively impact the future business model. And notably, deployment time has been reduced from 30 hours to a mere three minutes.

Best Overall Change Project: WWF

WWF’s project delivered a completely new digital platform in just four months. They now have a MACH platform that is capable of multi-channel revenue generation across web, mobile, kiosk, and signage. The organization demonstrated improved campaign conversion and increased digital revenue conversion, among other results. The judging panel felt this project was a first of its kind transformation for an NGO.

Contributor of the Year: Paul Hornby, The Very Group

Paul Hornby has done a tremendous amount to advocate for MACH and to serve as a guiding voice for others in the industry. He has demonstrably driven composable architecture at The Very Group in his role as Digital Customer Experience Director, and has created a solid roadmap to move onto a composable MACH architecture with the customer at the heart – a great blueprint for other companies to follow.

Team of the Year: Mars

The Mars team worked together to build a composable experience platform for a global portfolio of brands. The team consisted of more than 100 individuals spanning 14 countries. With expertise in business strategy, operations, software engineering, enterprise integrations, UX, CX, SEO and accessibility, this dynamic team achieved an iterative monolith-to-MACH transformation that truly stands out.

“The volume of nominations this year, along with the value demonstrated for each project, was incredibly impressive,” said judging chair and MACH Alliance co-founder, Sonja Keerl. ”In particular, the significant uptake in healthcare and hospitality submissions indicates a widening of MACH adoption beyond commerce use cases. We developed the concept of this awards program to showcase the real world benefits a MACH approach can deliver for all kinds of businesses, and it has done exactly that. Compared to just a year ago, we can clearly see how MACH adoption is growing and how the projects are maturing, delivering tangible business value in so many ways.”

To learn more, visit https://machalliance.org/mach-impact-awards.

About the MACH Alliance

The MACH Alliance is a [501(c)(6)] non-profit organization, governed by an independent board and does not endorse specific vendors, members or otherwise. The Alliance was formed in June 2020 to help enterprise organizations navigate the complex modern technology landscape. It aims to guide and show the business advantage of open tech ecosystems that are Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless. All MACH Alliance members meet certification principles that are published on the website.

The MACH Alliance welcomes technology companies and individual industry experts who share the same vision for the future. Learn more at machalliance.org, read here about MACH certification and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.