Red Wing Shoe Company

Open Source Logging System for Red Wing Shoe Company

Replaced a legacy logging system with a more robust and modern open source tool

“ILM?s expertise and depth of knowledge have been a considerable asset to the entire Red Wing for Business project.?
Kevin Trocinski, Director of Software Development

Implemented an open source solution to replace a legacy logging system

The Challenge

Red Wing Shoe Company had an established reimbursement program for work boots. Partner companies would provide their employees with a paper slip to give to a Red Wing Shoe retailer in exchange for boots. The retailer would mail the slip to Red Wing?s corporate office and the company would bill the partner company for the boots. Red Wing Shoe Company wanted to move the reimbursement program to an entirely digital system, reducing the staff hours and reimbursement lag time of the paper system. ILM was hired to help with this project. After reviewing Red Wing?s systems, in addition to the digitization project, ILM suggested the company update its legacy logging system to a more robust and modern tool.

Our Solution

Taking into consideration Red Wing?s scale and business needs, ILM recommended the open source solution Elasticsearch because of its quick ramp-up time, security features, and analytics reporting tools. ILM set to work customizing the code for Red Wing?s needs and using Mulesoft to integrate Elasticsearch with four other systems for the Red Wing for Business project. ILM set up Elastic Cloud for logging storage, providing Red Wing with machine learning capabilities. In total, ILM spent six months perfecting the systems integrations and training the company?s developers on using Elasticsearch.

Results

The new logging system was well-received at the company. The machine learning capabilities were a new tool for Red Wing, and the alert system and sales prediction tools have added tremendous business value. To date, the Red Wing for Business project was the largest technology initiative the company has ever undertaken and adding the new logging system functionality was a key to its success.