Implementation of Microservice-Based Replenishment System in Retail

In digitalisation projects, microservices have recently played a special role in the development of systems from scratch, gaining popularity both in practical cases and in academic researches. However, despite the fact that microservices have already demonstrated their effectiveness in a number of companies (in particular, media platforms and social networks), there are still a number of areas where the application of microservice architecture remains unexplored, and one of these areas is Supply Chain Management (SCM). Supply chains are one of the key drivers of customer value creation and therefore competitive advantage, which increases the attractiveness of this area for digitalisation in general and the use of microservices capabilities in particular. This thesis is devoted to the problem of using microservices in the implementation of a replenishment planning system in a Russian retail company. The main objective of the thesis was to propose and implement a variant of replenishment planning system implementation using microservices in a retail company and to evaluate the effectiveness of this implementation in terms of business effect. In order to achieve this goal, the following tasks were set and subsequently successfully implemented: - To study the features of microservice architecture and consider the problems of their application; - To perform a process decomposition of processes in SCM and outline the place of replenishment planning systems in the overall landscape; - To outline the features of replenishment planning systems in the retail context and analyse the applicability of microservices; - To analyze the business activities of retailer Alfa and the replenishment processes of the retail chain "Near Home", identify pain points of the current process and the systems used in it; - To propose a variant of implementation of the project on digitalization of the replenishment process of the retail chain " Near Home" and to estimate potential effects from this implementation. The study consists of 124 pages, 28 figures, 7 tables, 5 appendices. 73 domestic and foreign sources were used in writing this paper.