Magento ERP Integration and Back-Office Processes Optimization for a Norwegian Furniture Ecommerce Store
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The Overview
Kjellmann Office AS is a Norwegian family company that has been selling office furniture and supplies all over the country since 1997. The company maintains high standards throughout its practices, offering brands with environmental certifications and solid quality assurance, while aiming to provide customers with smart office solutions.
Kjellmann launched their Magento furniture ecommerce website in 2016 with the goal of making it easier for the business community to purchase office and interior items. Our cooperation with the company started a few years later when the need to make the back-office automation for the online store more efficient arose.
The Challenge
By the time we started collaborating with Kjellman, their website, Kjellmann.no, had already gained a solid online reputation, complete with a significant customer base and a large amount of orders already fulfilled. To speed up the ecommerce back-office processes and provide more flexibility, the Whidegroup team conducted a thorough analysis and recommended the following solutions:
- Integrate Kjellman’s Magento furniture ecommerce website with ERP system
- Extend functionality of the ERP integration with additional custom solutions for logistics
- Improve customer experience by updating product pages and adding some custom logic
The Ecommerce and Back Office Integration Solution
Following the results of the audit and our prepared plan of improvements, our team started implementing a comprehensive set of work for the project.
Magento ERP integration
Kjellmann has been using the 24SevenOffice resource planning system for years to store information about orders made both online and offline. Their Magento website contains a special xml file in the installation folder which is used by ERP to upload Magento orders into the system. The ERP then assigns its unique order number to each order and designates a personal manager for the order. Unfortunately, Kjellmann’s logistics managers had to gather the order data from both the Magento and ERP systems to get a complete picture about buyer and delivery information. These added steps made their job needlessly cumbersome and decreased efficiency.
In order to simplify things for them, we integrated the 24SevenOffice resource planning system fully into Magento and created a separate custom order information grid in the admin panel which contains complete information about the orders. We also added a new user role called 24SevenOffice, so only logistics managers - specific users from this group, could have access to this custom order information grid..
Information about orders is now updated using a cron job. We also added two custom buttons - “Hent ordre (Get order)” that allows for manually updating information about orders already presented in the custom grid and “Start oppdatering (Start update)” that synchronizes order data from Magento and ERP right away, while also outputting newly placed orders.
Extension of the ERP integration functionality
Ecommerce ERP integration has the goal to provide access and up-to-date information about orders to the company’s logistics staff. By adding a custom logic for its functionality, we widened their capabilities and helped to organize order delivery efficiently. To help in this a bit more, we added a logic for creating custom packing slips for each order directly from the custom order grid, allowing managers to then easily print them.
Finally, we also developed an internal message function, so users from the 24SevenOffice group can leave comments for each other about orders when necessary. Logistics managers can also set the date where the order was packed and designate the date of planned delivery.
User experience improvement
The Kjellmann website operates both in B2C and B2B sectors. Because of this, there was a need to show different prices for the clients - one set including VAT and the other set excluding VAT. Customers are now shown a pop-up for customer-type selection when first entering the website. We also added a dropdown in the top navigation bar for the same choice. Our solution was to output both prices on product pages, but hide one using JavaScript depending on the customer’s choice.
To improve product page functionality, we used two extensions. The first, Advanced Product Options, is an extension to add a custom text attribute for products that aren’t stored in Kjellmann’s warehouse. This allows for display of their approximate delivery term, and to output SKUs for each simple product inside Configurable to easily prepare orders for delivery.
The second extension we used is 360 Product Viewer, which allows for easy creation of interactive 360 product views on product pages, so customers can enjoy a detailed view of each product's functionality and design.
The Result
After our improvements were made, Kjellmann had significantly sped up their back-office processes - order processing, packing, and shipping. Online customers now experience a more user friendly interface and can get more information about the products on product pages. Kjellmann’s cooperation with corporate clients has also seen an increase in efficiency. Because corporations are usually tighter on deadlines, Kjellman wanted to better provide information about product availability. Now, customers can immediately see whether products are in stock at the Kjellman warehouse or with their distributors. This Magento furniture ecommerce solution has helped Kjellman provide a much better customer experience for their corporate partners.
Sondre Kjellmann
Kjellmann
Ecommerce Manager
" Whidegroup acts like a solid mechanism to eliminate bottlenecks, integrate our store with 3rd party services and keep our website on top of the league. Keep going! "
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