ePrice's expansion of services thanks to Boomi

Camp

Digital Transformation

Business Area

E-commerce

Solution

System Integration

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 grown over the years thanks in part 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, thanks to the collaboration with more than 8,000 professional sellers from Italy and abroad.

Background:

Following the IPO ePrice had to begin a rapid process of enrichment and integration of dozens of services. 

To do this, he used Boomi by involving the Mind-Mercatis team in the design and implementation phases of the infrastructure solution

Theexpansion of services with Boomi

As part of this growth process, ePrice had to expand its services, and to do so it equipped itself with numerous systems. Most notably, Mind-Mercatis stepped in with Oracle RightNow CRM (for the call center)and SAP ERP (enterprise management).

Challenge: 

ePrice's previous management system was essentially indistinguishable from e-commerce, so the project to adopt SAP (hosted) brought to light the need to detach e-commerce from the management system and 'rewire' dozens and dozens of hand-built integrations between external systems and the management system.

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 inside 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 with an initial adoption wave of about 6 months and then 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 the IT-Operations team) and leveraged our Boomi team to consistently provide rapid and flexible solutions to problems that if addressed with more traditional approaches could have stalled or delayed key project streams.

The Mind-Mercatis approach: