The client is a leading digital commerce enabler providing end to end solution for brands to reach the booming, digital savvy millennial and Generation Z consumers. Offering integrated services to make ecommerce brands operate seamlessly over multiple retail channels by streamlining the core business processes using the technology and tools.
The Project
The Business Challenge
The client got in touch with the ISHIR team to transform their legacy system which was built for inventory and order management for a single channel retail outlet. Thus making it a challenge for their existing customers to use the solution for multi channel retail and still having the ability to maintain unified inventory, order management and fulfilment
Clearly the business goal was to enable the brands and online retailers to be able to sell on multiple online platforms and provide them the required integrations and still be able to manage unified inventory and order management.
The technology bottleneck was that the existing system was very tightly coupled with a specific technology platform and the entire backend solution i.e. order management system, CRM, ERP was based on an open source system. With growing demand for unified commerce, the client was propelled to create an automated solution that allows to organize the inventory operations with a centralized log-in to manage all sorts of operations.
Project Goals
Provide support for integrating multiple different online platforms
- Synchronize Orders From Different Online Channels to a Unified Dashboard - Update Order and Dispatch Status from the Dashboard to Online Channels Manage Cancellations - Synchronize Product Catalogue and Inventory From a Unified Dashboard to the Online Channels
Provide ability to integrate to different online channels rapidly
- Define a generic interface between unified dashboard and the online channels - Decouple platform integrations from the core system
Fault tolerance
- Ability to retry operations and recover from failures
Process
Design Phase
With the evolving business needs, retailers need an omnichannel solution to compete in today's competitive market. Providing an omnichannel commerce operation can be a difficult undertaking. Our approach was to simplify the complexities of omnichannel, enabling the client's end user to meet growing consumer demand anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
Legacy System Modernization
The ISHIR team tackled the problem and broke the system down to create an abstract interface between their legacy system and any future or existing system the client wanted to integrate. In order to create a unified view of the inventory across different channels and for the solution to works robustly within a multichannel sales environment, the team enabled loose coupling between the different services, and therefore, the retailer can make changes with practically no disturbance to the other parts of the system.
Development Phase
Another aspect of the tacking problem was to take care of the exchange of the data between the different platforms a retailer or brand is selling their product. Since every platform can have a different database schemas, we ensured that the platform would pick the data in their preferred format. This was done by creating by a normalization layer between the applications that would allow easy exchange of data in the required format.
Value Delivered
After an extensive development phase, ISHIR team was successful in delivering the omnichannel technology platform. The solutions was capable to deliver business insights, order management, purchase management, and catalogue management capabilities.