Overview
The Internet Gardener is an eCommerce retailer based in rural Nottinghamshire. Across their four websites they provide a wide range of home and garden products.
With IMan, Internet Gardener integrated their eCommerce platform with Sage200 to process an ever increasing amount of orders in an efficient, robust and automated manner.
This case study describes the first stage of Internet Gardeners evolution with IMan; a subsequent case study describes how IMan was used to automate a number of key sales order cycle processes.
ESPI & Realisable
After a review of several integration solutions for Sage200, ESPI chose IMan as it provided a platform that was highly configurable & configuration based, flexible enough to cater for Internet Gardener’s requirements and integrated natively via the Sage200 API.
Requirements
Accounting system upgrade – Upgrading from Sage50 to Sage200, the immediate requirement for Internet Gardener was to integrate their bespoke eCommerce solution with Sage200. The existing Sage50 solution used a manual file based import mechanism, but ideally the new solution needed to be much more flexible, more automated and be able to handle a much higher volume of data.
Solution
IMan was able to automate the transfer of data from Internet Gardener’s four websites:
- All pending data could be queried directly from the eCommerce’s intermediate staging database, thereby removing the previous clumsy file based process of the previous Sage50 import.
- Import of customers and their details into Sage200, including logic for identifying existing customers.
- Due to the extended attributes required by the eCommerce platform, item master records were being managed in a separate database. The import process dynamically creates any new items within Sage200 with accompanying location, supplier & unit of measure records, before the importing sales order.
- Import of sales orders, incorporating data transformation for delivery charges and comments and formula based logic for item variants, allocation and the fulfilment methods.
- IMan’s customisable audit report provides Internet Gardener with key data, enabling them to reconcile and quickly identify any errors or issues with the import process.
- Unattended imports are made through IMan’s own windows service based scheduler.
Further Improvement
After the eCommerce integration go-live, Internet Gardener quickly identified a number of processes that could be automated using IMan. With some elementary IMan training where Internet Gardener were able to:
- Automate generation and sending of purchase orders (in Excel format) to suppliers for ‘Direct to Customer’ orders.
- Automate the generation of CSV formatted picking list for their 3rd Party warehouse.
- Several other bespoke data feeds and uplifts.
Outcome
IMan was able to provide a highly configurable integration platform for Internet Gardener, capable of addressing all their requirements and a solution where ‘tweaks’ and changes could be made easily and in a cost-effective manner.