Complex
Retail

Poor ERP integration can impair an entire supply chain.

A family-owned consumer electronic goods superstore with a true omnichannel business model is composed of physical stores and a comprehensive ecommerce site. The site is home to more than 100,000 products, generating over 200,000 orders per year. Orchestrating supply chain logistics at this volume requires more than rudimentary control of orders and customer accounts.

For this complex high-traffic ecosystem, real time inventory visibility across systems is absolutely essential for providing every customer with the optimum shopping experience for product availability and expedient fulfillment. On the backend, tight inventory integration is the only way to avoid inventory shortfalls or overages, coordinate closely with a range of manufacturers, and process high volume payment transactions.

Unfortunately, a legacy integration between the ecommerce store and Mach ERP was failing to deliver the sophisticated inventory forecasting tools, system reliability, and scalability that this rapidly growing business required. Customers were not able to receive up to the minute ship quotes, and flawed integrations with payment gateway PAYware had led to significant resource drains and impaired customer service.

Magento: A false start which compounded problems.

While some of the business' vendors suggested joining a Magento ecommerce ecosystem, claims of "off the shelf API integration" with Mach ERP and PAYware proved to be a very costly exaggeration. Unfortunately, Magento remains a market presence by default, not by innovation, having devolved over many cycles into a bloated, cost-ineffective security risk.

Due to the complex nature of ERP APIs, it's simply not possible for a connector to "turn on" and effectively interact with ecommerce data. Channeling data into meaningful use for shipping, payments, shopping cart abandonment, returns, credits, and more requires careful configuration over hundreds of unique variables.

Before this became apparent, more than a year was spent attempting to develop a new Magento ecommerce site. Magento's open-source, unsupported code and plug-in dependent software created delays, impaired basic functionality, and failed to integrate Mach to the usability standards required for large scale business.

Rather than join the ranks of businesses struggling to make sense of overwhelming Magento integration headaches, the project was ultimately abandoned after more than a $100,000 spend, and the business turned to Miva's flexible logic-based code and powerful support network to re-imagine the total ecommerce system from the ground up.

Moving beyond "plug & play" to true custom integration.

Miva's Solutions Architecture team re-scoped the entire ecommerce website and clarified the essential features and functionality of critical Mach and PAYware integrations. A new Miva site was then conceived, built, and launched with flawless sync with Mach ERP, to enable total control of order management and fulfillment, including payment data, shipping method mappings, and sales tax.

Miva's superior PAYware integration ensures real time credit card authorization, instantly liberating customer service teams from the time-consuming task of manually authorizing every credit card purchase via simple validation – an error-prone system which had severely impacted customer experience and overall efficiency.

Fulfilling the primary goal of every business: customer satisfaction.

Miva also built a real time inventory integration with Mach to ensure real time updates to inventory counts, with granular detail about ship-by dates incorporating up-to-the-minute information from supplier portals. The ultimate winner is the customer, who now has access to hyper-relevant availability, pricing, and attribute content, as well as the seamless option to avoid shortfalls by shipping direct from the manufacturer when stock outs occur.

The power of premium ERP integration is further passed on to the customer in the form of elaborate real-time order status and history, allowing for more self-service and better overall customer experience.

Getting data to "talk" between systems is both an art and a science. Miva's Professional Services team & Solutions Partner network worked closely with the Mach system, bringing an innate understanding of the Miva software platform, combined with a total strategic vision for core brand goals. By custom-configuring its own advanced ecommerce software, Miva helped to orchestrate a powerful new customer experience for shoppers, founded upon real-time data across products, manufacturers, shippers, and highly diverse shopping channels.