e-commerce integration project
The Task
Integration of B2B e-commerce solution with the ERP system
A growing pan-European reseller engaged us to help them integrate their existing e-commerce system with their ERP solution in order to reduce overheads by automating a number of manual processes, and provide a higher level of efficiency, as well as improved service to their customer base.
The Project
The customer, who is a UK based IT reseller with several European locations, provides IT solutions and hardware for well known corporations in Europe. It provides its customers with bespoke portals to simplify their ordering process, and provides the customer with a simple web portal where they can order from a pre-approved catalogue of products, view stock levels, manage delivery locations, and access their consumption and expenditure reports.
Most enterprise level e-commerce and ERP solutions have much of this functionality available within their platforms, but they are aimed at large companies with the available resources and finances to run large e-commerce departments. Many mid-market e-commerce solutions, such as Magento and Shopify, also have good abilities to exchange data with external systems, but whilst many corresponding mid-market ERP systems, such as MS D365, Sage or Xero, have good data exchange capabilities, they do not always integrate well with e-commerce platforms.
To overcome this, our customer had been treating the two systems as separate entities, so all data exchanged between them was done via manual processes, which were becoming very inefficient as the business was growing, and it was also becoming impossible to provide the level of order status being demanded by customers.
We were tasked with linking their B2B e-commerce platform to their ERP hosted order management platform, which we did by sourcing, evaluating and implementing the appropriate tools to automate the customer order process.
The Process
The process kicked off with workshops to understand and document the incumbent manual system processes, detailing the workflow, and determining where business logic would need to preside in the process. There also needed to be agreement as to where those business decision points would need to be, so that business rules were not broken. In this case it would mean setting flags on orders during the data exchange, based on information contained within those orders, that would trigger certain behaviour within the order management system, for example, placing an order on hold for manual release and alerting certain users when those orders were ready for review and release.
After analysing the workflow, type and volume of orders, and the options available to us in both systems, we recommended the use of an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool that would essentially become a hub, providing a translation layer for the extraction of order data from the e-commerce system, and after conforming the data into a format that was compatible with the ERP platform, inject it into the order management system via the hub solution that we had helped to implement previously.
The hub solution was designed to be extensible via a plug-in architecture, so once again, we worked with their system integrator to build it, and in doing so we were also able to leverage this development to provide regular stock levels updates from the ERP system back into the e-commerce system, which was a secondary requirement, as well as providing key reports that were also a customer requirement.
The implementation of this solution was key to helping the company grow and become more responsive to their customers, especially during the pandemic, when they saw a huge increase their daily orders, as companies reacted to the requirement to provide IT equipment to their staff that were now working remotely.