Customer Background

Our customer is a Global Retailer and Designer of Carpet tile with a presence all across the globe. Their massive global presence spans over 6 continents, with over 40 global showrooms supported by modular tile manufacturing in Australia, China, Thailand, The United Kingdom, The United States of America and The Netherlands. They are committed to serve international customers through their team, which provides customer support in more than 40 different languages fluently.

Technology Used

The products and technologies used in this effort by our team and the customer were,

• IBM WebSphere Commerce Server v7.0
• IBM WebSphere Application Server v7.0
• IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus
• IBM CastIron
• Oracle JD Edwards
• Oracle CRM On Demand
• Adobe Scene 7
• Clickability (Content Management System)
• product Configurator

The Business Challenge

Our customer operates their business across Americas, APAC and EMEA,

• Customer had home grown PIM solution which was not integrated with product master JDE and resulted in data discrepancy on the website
• Functionalities such as placing an order, order history, order details, order search, order status updates were not robust enough to support customers and sales executives within the organization
• Not able to get real time product inventory updates
• Product search, search by product attributes and content search were not user friendly
• Customer had a home grown CRM system which was not integrated well with the website and account executives did not have enough visibility on their customer leads and opportunities, and there was no proper channel to associate web customer approvals
• No true content management solution, and business had to depend on IT team to add a content page, and there was no way to reuse the content for other regions
• Customer had tile configurator which was not robust enough and not integrated with the website and didn't have ordering capability

Our Solution and Support

Our team has a rich history of working with the IBM WebSphere Commerce Technology Suite and this helped our team to understand the customer's challenges and in turn support their results perfectly.

• Designed an architecture, which defines the flow of product data from respective JDE instance such as Americas, EMEA and APAC regions to IBM WCS providing a global PIM solution, which drives global marketing and business teams to manage their products, and this solution is built using industry standard IBM WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere ESB
• Website providing a seamless ordering capability and transferring orders to backend JDE order management system and website also provides real time product inventory, order status, order history, order details to both customers as well as sales executives, and this solution is built using industry standard IBM WebSphere ESB
• Oracle CRM onDemand (SaaS) is integrated with the website supporting true customer registration/approval/denial workflow, and this solution is built using industry standard IBM CastIron
• Robust content management solution is in place, which provides capabilities to marketing and business teams to write content once and share across the regions, workflow approval process, content search enablement, associate content to product and enablement of content internationalization, and this solution is built using Clickability(CMS) SaaS
• Website providing robust type ahead search, content search, product attribute based search, product inventory based search and many more filters are available to get the results quicker on what customer is looking for and this solution is built using SOLR search engine
• Product configurator is integrated with the website to get the product feed, ordering samples from the tile configurator
• In-time fixing of the QA defects that came as a part of Quality Assurance Cycle
• Addressing the changes in the business requirements to handle various integration challenges

Customer Benefits

Through our innovative and passionate services the customer was able to achieve a huge number of benefits out of which the following are a few,

• Ability to serve product data from one single point i.e., GPDM to multiple systems such as global websites, global CRM, tile configurator and more
• Ability to place order from website to backend system for order fulfillment
• Ability to show live product inventory onto to the WCS from backend systems
• Ability to manage and associate respective users and account executives within the company
• Ability to showcase the respective marketing and product content onto the website
• Ability to search products and content quicker