With a 200-year history in the construction industry and as the largest distributor of building materials in the UK, the Travis Perkins Group operates over 20 businesses across the UK, including well-known retailers such as Wickes, Tile Giant and Tool Station and owns 19 product brands within these businesses. Headquartered in Northampton, the company has more than 29,000 employees across more than 2,000 branches, stores and sites around the UK.

In 2016 Travis Perkins reviewed its business strategy with a view to making the most of the company’s unique size and reach. Having been so acquisitive over the years, they were in an excellent position to exploit the Group’s scale to improve efficiency and enhance its customer experience. To fully capitalise on its unique position and realise its strategy, the company needed to make sure that its systems were fit for purpose.

Travis Perkins made the decision to invest in a new enterprise software solution that would help to deliver efficiency to the business and its customers, reduce IT expense and provide the company with real-time data and reports. They needed a middleware expert that could integrate its many co-dependent platforms. After a thorough vendor selection process, Mitra Innovation was selected based on our status as a WSO2 Premier Integration Partner, our team’s extensive skill set, our innovative outlook and reputation for integrity.

Mitra assembled an expert team of 50 integration specialists, software architects, project managers and data specialists for this major project. The multi-skilled team would be responsible for requirements and integration analysis as well as designing, testing, implementing and supporting a scalable middleware WSO2 solution that would evolve in line with the company objectives. The main task was to build targeted, integrated solutions for the Travis Perkins subsidiaries. Mitra has identified and integrated numerous downstream systems so that any changes made to company records automatically update related data sources and their supporting applications. In addition, for the Travis Perkins HR team, work undertaken by Mitra means they now update employee data in one core location, regardless of which part of the business the employee is from, saving time and ensuring a single source of truth.