- System & Data Integration
ePrice's expansion of services thanks to Boomi
Business Area
E-commerce
Solution
System Integration
The Client
ePRICE is Italy's leading online sales marketplace since 2000.
Since July 2022, ePRICE has been acquired by Portobello company that owns the retail chain of the same name and Riba Mundo Tecnologia, the market leader in Europe in the purchase and resale of electronic products in the B2B segment.
Due to the flexibility of the two companies' business model, the acquisition, enables the entire group to become an omnichannel operator. Founded in 2000 as an e-commerce site for computer and electronic products, ePRICE has also grown over the years thanks to the Marketplace, which opened in 2014 and has evolved over the years.
- The catalog has expanded, now reaching 14 million products in every product category
- Collaboration with more than 8000 professional sellers from Italy and abroad
The challenge
ePrice's previous management system was essentially indistinct from e-commerce, so the project to adopt SAP (hosted) brought to light the need to:
- The need to detach e-commerce from management
- 'Rewire' dozens and dozens of hand-crafted integrations between external systems and the management system
Following the IPO ePrice had to begin a rapid process of enrichment and integration of dozens of services.
To do so, it used Boomi by involving the Mind-Mercatis team in the design and implementation phases of the infrastructure solution. Specifically, Mind-Mercatis intervened with Oracle RightNow CRM (for the call center)and SAP ERP (enterprise management).
The project
The adoption of SAP ERP came at a time when the company was highly dynamic and transforming, so it was clear that the peripheral systems in place (call centers, warehouses, dispatchers, subcontractors, etc.) and planned could be changed at any time.
For faster and less risky change, the choice was to NOT CABLE these connections within SAP but to adopt a center-to-star approach in which the ESB bus (Boomi) would receive and distribute all messages and updates (e.g., new price lists, orders, invoices, shipment notifications). The project ran at a rapid pace:
- a first wave of adoption of about 6 months
- A second wave of refinement and integration in which some of the peripheral systems were replaced and others were more tightly integrated
The client coordinated with its own PMO team all vendors (primarily an SAP partner, its own internal eCommerce team, and IT-Operations team) and benefited from our Boomi team:
The Mind-Mercatis team supported the client by consistently providing quick and flexible solutions to problems that if addressed with more traditional approaches could have stalled or delayed key project streams.
The strategy
Oracle RightNow: Oracle's call center CRM has been integrated with the e-commerce backend for the purpose of having real-time transactions in progress. The need for real time is related to the cost of re-managing calls from customers who immediately after placing an order change their mind or realize they got something wrong (e.g., shipping address). The introduction of RightNow was intended to zero out these costs by allowing the call center to have the data essentially live (previously the call center would ask the customer to call back to give the system time to align)
SAP ERP adoption: Separating Eprice's management and e-commerce would have been very costly and would have made the SAP adoption path critical; in order to decouple the problems, a synchronization approach was adopted: we made synchronizations with Boomi that allowed e-commerce and legacy integrations to continue to talk to the old management system, and then through Boomi such information flowed bidirectionally between SAP and the old management system tables. This solution provided SAP with a solid and orchestrated frontier and avoided migration risks on the core (e-commerce) part.
The results
Oracle RightNow: real-time sync of key transactions and periodic sync of everything else; reduced number of recalls due to missing data in post-purchase call scenario
SAP ERP: adoption of SAP ERP while minimizing impacts on the e-Commerce component, full sync of the e-commerce platform with the management back-end that engages suppliers, orders, issues invoices and manages warehouses
