Case Study

Brief

NICEIC is the commercial division of The Electrical Safety Council, the organization provides training and support for electricians nationwide. NICEIC Direct is the eCommerce webshop supported by a widely distributed print catalogue and provides materials and goods for qualified electricians, many of which are linked to a qualification. With over 90 different levels of qualification, the webshop needed to present materials available to purchase based on a purchaser registration number in a clear concise manner while drawing the information from different sources internally. This was a massively complex operation drawing data from 3 different heavyweight database systems. The role of big:group was to determine a path that integrated the different databases while not compromising the speed and efficiency of purchase

Strategy

Big Group determined that to be able to pull the data from different ERP systems the most effective route would be to overlay a customized eCommerce platform and use a connector to pull data from the existing ERP’s and use this connector cartridge to re-interpret the data in two ways – using a connector as a pull, we could capture users registration numbers and pull verification from a Visio registration database to authenticate the user and then push the purchasing request to SAP to interrogate and approve a purchase and upon purchase either push to Sun Systems for invoicing or to Pay Point for credit card purchases. Using the push and pull technique allowed for immediate approvals on the key stages of purchase that had the potential to delay a sale.

Execution

The project commenced with a 2 month consultancy to gather requirements from all stakeholders within the business which included IT, Customer Services, Finance and Marketing. The findings from this exercise needed to be joined up with existing technical systems and developed into a proof of concept that utilized our chosen eCommerce platform ePages and a core connection cartridge for the push and pull into and out of SAP Business One. This connection was tested in line with all existing systems SAP Business One, Sun Systems, Radio Beacon and Visio database. Upon sign off of the concept proof, build commenced. Functionality was the primary focus and as this was a restricted access B2B ecommerce application, design took the form of simple interface based on NICEIC corporate guidelines. Agency and Client took part in constant and consistent testing at each stage of build and integration. this slowed development down but ensured that each stage of the customer journey which allowed for a wide range of different pushes and pulls regarding 90 different potential product presentations dependent on their level of qualifications, customized tax and shipping rules and well as the different requirements from customer groups for immediate online purchase or account payments.

Results

Given the extensive trialing, the site launched risk free with immediate and consistent online ordering which continues to grow as new and distinct product lines are rolled out online. The revenue is in excess of seven figures. The site is now supported by a new format mail catalogue as well as online advertising targeting the electrical purchasing market. 2nd phase planning now includes increased eCRM, mobile technologies and differentiated delivery options. Our eCommerce client and project lead at NICEIC stated “I would always highly recommend big group for eCommerce especially really technically challenging projects – they thought big and they delivered big”