Enterprise Plus Case Study

Overview

Industry context: High-volume manufacturing with finished-goods specifications that must be agreed before production is scheduled.

Legacy process: Product data lived inside a heavily customised Tier 1 ERP. Customers ordered via forms, phone, and email - with no online catalogue or self-service.

Objective: Let public visitors browse the catalogue and raise enquiries, and let authenticated customers place and track orders - while Customer Service retains review control before anything enters the ERP.

Solution framework: Two external storefronts and a customer portal connect to dCommerce via native APIs. The order management system collates enquiries and portal orders for Customer Service review, then submits to the ERP through a custom connector. Fulfilment confirmations return via asynchronous inbound email, closing a clear two-way loop across storefronts, portal, platform, and ERP.

Challenge

Without an online catalogue or order-entry facility, customers relied on basic forms, phone calls, and email. That channel mix produced data-entry errors and incorrect production specifications - expensive problems when finished-goods details must be right before scheduling.

Operations ran on a heavily customised Tier 1 ERP that already handled production, financial ledgers, and invoicing well. Extending that ERP to support detailed e-commerce scenarios was treated as a significant diversification away from its core purpose - adding risk, cost, and long-term maintenance burden.

Customer Service absorbed the gap with manual order entry. The ERP’s order-entry UI was fragmented, which lengthened lead times and increased IT overhead. IT had introduced a custom Event Bus connector to mediate integrations, but fulfilment feedback still arrived only through email automation - limiting how far modern event-driven patterns could be applied.

Security and compliance added a hard constraint: infrastructure and data had to remain fully isolated. Shared, multi-tenant public-cloud software was prohibited. The business needed a single-tenant environment that could still deliver modern buyer experiences without compromising governance.

Solution

dCommerce was deployed as a single-tenant Enterprise Plus environment, with a separate staging environment for controlled testing before production changes.

Two independent public websites were built on the dCommerce storefront foundation, each connected to the order management system’s product catalogue in real time via REST APIs. Public visitors can raise business enquiries that land in the order management system for visibility and assignment to the right sales team.

Product administration moved outside the ERP where it belongs for digital commerce. Marketing and IT can update product attributes, ordering rules, and digital assets in the order management system - reducing the need for further ERP customisations and cutting ongoing IT administration around catalogue content.

Contracted customers use the B2B customer portal to create and monitor orders around the clock. Although the platform natively supports contract pricing, the client chose to keep existing ERP invoicing workflows. Both websites and the portal therefore operate on a hidden-price basis, so the ERP remains the final authority for invoice generation.

For large portal orders, Customer Service can review the submission, split it into multiple batches to match warehousing needs, and send each batch to the custom ERP connector as a distinct order via secure REST API calls. The ERP processes each batch according to its internal logic.

After processing, the ERP generates and sends a fulfilment confirmation email* back to the order management system. The platform’s email delivery connector matches each confirmation to the originating batch and closes the integration loop, so every batch is tracked from customer entry through ERP acceptance.

Together, the websites, customer portal, order management system, and ERP form an end-to-end path: customers self-serve where appropriate; Customer Service retains editorial control on complex work; and the Tier 1 ERP stays protected as the system of record. The replicated staging environment supports DevOps discipline - integrations can be validated before they touch production.

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

Benefits

The manufacturer opened a modern digital front door for new business and a self-service path for existing accounts - without turning the Tier 1 ERP into an e-commerce engine. Ordering complexity sits upstream; invoicing and fulfilment authority stay where they already belonged.

Modernised customer-facing systems: Extendable storefronts and a portal give buyers a maintainable digital layer, while the core ERP is shielded from deep e-commerce customisation.

Custom order management for complex work: Multi-batch orders can be shaped from a single customer entry, submitted to the ERP, and automatically reconciled - without forcing customers through a fragmented back-office UI.

Product catalogue administration upstream: Marketing can manage catalogue content primarily in the order management system, with only the necessary product line items retained in the ERP.

Reduced Customer Service load: Long-standing clients moved to portal self-service for routine ordering, cutting manual keying and freeing the team for higher-value enquiries and specification work.

ERP protected as system of record: Hidden pricing and deferred invoicing keep commercial authority in the ERP, while dCommerce absorbs catalogue presentation, enquiry capture, and order-review complexity.

Enterprise security clearance: The isolated, single-tenant deployment met IT’s isolation and data-governance requirements - with a fully replicated staging environment to de-risk change.

A natural Enterprise Plus fit: Dedicated hosting, staging, storefronts, portal, and bespoke ERP connector work map to the plan’s purpose - high complexity and full isolation, with room for specialised integration via Digital Services when the standard path is not enough.

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