Enterprise Plus Case Study

Overview

Legacy process: Product data isolated within a highly customised Tier 1 ERP, creating a substantial barrier to integration with customer-facing order entry.

Objective: Enable public and authenticated users to access the product catalogue, allowing public users to generate enquiries and authenticated users to manage orders via self-service functionality.

Solution framework: The platform connects two external storefronts to the order management system via native storefront APIs. The order management system serves as a collation point for enquiries entered via external storefronts and orders entered via the customer portal, allowing the Customer Service team to review and edit order data before allowing it to enter the ERP. The ERP, upon processing orders, sends fulfilment confirmations to the order management system via an asynchronous inbound email integration. This process ensures a clear, two-way data exchange between the web storefronts, the order management system, and the ERP.

Challenge

The client operates a high-volume production facility handling varying finished-goods specifications that must be agreed upon prior to scheduling.

Without an online catalogue or order-entry facility, customers had to communicate via basic forms, phone calls, and email, which led to data-entry errors and incorrect production specifications.

The company managed its operations via a heavily customised deployment of a Tier 1 ERP. While the ERP successfully handled production, core financial ledgers and invoicing, extending its functionality to accommodate detailed e-commerce scenarios was considered a significant diversification from the system's core capabilities and purpose.

Customer Service teams were dedicated to manual order entry due to a lack of customer self-service solutions. The ERP’s order-entry UI was fragmented, leading to process inefficiencies, longer lead times, and increased IT maintenance overhead.

IT operations required the introduction of a custom connector as an Event Bus to mediate ERP integrations. Despite this, order fulfilment feedback was transmitted exclusively via email automation, limiting IT's ability to leverage modern event-driven integration.

IT security compliance required complete isolation of infrastructure and data. Adoption of shared, multi-tenant public cloud software was prohibited, necessitating a single-tenant environment.

Solution

The platform was deployed as a single-tenant Enterprise Plus environment with a separate Staging Environment.

Two independent public websites were deployed using the dCommerce storefront websites as their foundation, providing direct access to the order management system's product catalogue via REST APIs in real time.

The websites allow entry of business queries, which are captured in the order management system to ensure visibility and enable assignment to the appropriate sales team.

The platform enables administration of product data outside of the ERP. Marketing and IT teams can update product attributes, ordering rules, and digital assets in the order management system, eliminating the need for further ERP customisations and minimising IT administration overhead.

Contracted customers have access to the platform's B2B customer portal, allowing them to create and monitor orders 24/7.

While the platform natively supports customer-specific pricing, the client opted to preserve their existing ERP invoicing workflows. Both websites and the customer portal are configured to operate on a hidden-price basis, which allows the back-end ERP to serve as the final authority for invoice generation.

When a customer places a large order through the customer portal, the Customer Server team can analyse the order, split it into multiple batches based on warehousing needs, and send each batch as a unique order to the custom ERP connector via secure REST API calls. The ERP then processes each order batch according to internal ERP logic.

For order confirmations, after the ERP processes each batch, it automatically generates and sends a fulfilment confirmation email* back to the order management system. The platform's email delivery connector receives these emails, matches them to the originating order batches, and closes the integration loop, ensuring each batch is accurately tracked through every step.

The solution delivers end-to-end integration across the website, customer portal, order management system, and ERP. A separate staging environment ensures controlled testing of integrations before production deployment, supporting DevOps best practices.

* While this specific enterprise architecture relies on email confirmations, the platform's integration layer natively supports REST API webhooks and polling on a preconfigured frequency.

Benefits

By deploying a fully integrated solution, the business extended its reach in promoting its product catalogue to new business, whilst improving the ordering experience for existing customers.

Modernised customer-facing systems: New digital interfaces provide a customer-facing layer that is extendable and maintainable whilst protecting the core ERP from extensive integration and customisation.

Custom order management: Complex multi-batch orders are generated from the customer entry, submitted to the ERP, and automatically reconciled, providing an intelligent way to handle order distribution without adversely affecting the customers' ordering experience.

Product catalogue administration: The marketing team can now manage the product catalogue primarily within the order management system, with only a single product line item existing within the ERP.

Reduced customer service load: Long-standing clients shifted entirely to self-service portal ordering, reducing manual keying tasks and freeing internal teams to focus on higher-level business enquiries.

Enterprise security clearance: The isolated deployment met all security and data governance requirements, ensuring ongoing compliance for IT operations.

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