Athena: link between e-commerce portal and custom ERP

IT Dept.

www.athena.eu

  • Sector: applications and supplies for automotive, earth moving and agricultural machinery, food industry, gearboxes, compressors, heating/cooling sector
  • Revenue: 117.000.000 €
  • Number of employees: > 600

 

The problem

Athena Spa needed to speed up and automate all the operations related to the exchange of data between the Aftermarket products portal and the management software.

The needs expressed by the customer were two:

  • To manage, in real time, the update of the products catalog published on the portal.
  • To synchronize data of orders, placed by customers and the sales network (agents) on the portal, with the management software, uploading data in real time for a more efficient management of the process by the commercial office.

 

The solution: DuploDB

The DuploDB implementation helped to manage, in real time and in bidirectional mode, the update processes between the management software, located in the headquarters of the company in the province of Vicenza, and the e-commerce portal, hosted at the server farm of a service provider in Bologna.

 

In particular, the solution adopted has solved the following problems:

  • Given the distributed geographic location of the servers, the update of the catalog was run asynchronously, with the alignment of data carried out with scheduled operations. With the adoption of Duplo, the master data of the items that reside in the database of the management software, are now synchronized in real time with the tables used in the portal for the Aftermarket catalog.
  • The same way, the orders data collected by the e-commerce section of the portal, input from both the sale network of the company and from customers, are now synchronized in real time with the database of the management software, allowing a timely management of the flow of fulfillment of the order.
  • The temporary unavailability of the communication line and/or the temporary unavailability of the database (eg. for maintenance operations) are automatically managed, thanks to the particular characteristics of the product, that is able to manage the capture of the data also in off-line mode, to restore the exact sequence when the line and/or the database are available again.

 

Advantages of the solution

The exchange of information to and from the e-commerce portal now takes place in real time, making it much more efficient and timely the work of users who manage the back office, while maintaining unchanged the entire structure of the IT system, without any intervention on applications.

The adoption of Duplo, besides solving the immediate problems related to the synchronization of the data related to the Aftermarket Management, has enabled the customer to have an architecture that can be used in the future development plans of the Company, such as the creation of a Corporate Portal, and the interchange of data in real time with the other companies of the Group.

`` Duplo has given a concrete response to the need to speed up and automate the alignment of the product catalog and the e-commerce order flow, which has resulted in a significant time saving. The environment setup was not particularly difficult, in a morning everything was fully operational. ``
Emanuel Righetto - Web Strategist - Athena S.p.a.
The selected software