IMPLEMENTING A STANDARDIZED INTEGRATION PLATFORM

IMPLEMENTING A STANDARDIZEDINTEGRATION PLATFORM TODELIVER EXTRAORDINARYCUSTOMER EXPERIENCEIn the last decade, the retail industry has evolved enormously. Theincreasing popularity of eCommerce has allowed retailers to expand their presence with almost no limits – pretty exciting but alsoquite challenging! Questions like customer retention, competitiveadvantage, revenue generation, and cost optimization, among others, remain key challenges for all retailers whether they have digitalpresence or not. Nonetheless, the booming digital transformationof retail businesses has brought up new challenges, many of whichare directly related to inefficient application integration.Among our customers, we encountered four major pain points that are commonto many retail businesses. These could be effectively addressed by smartapplication integration, which likely could also help retailers deal with otherchallenges that seemingly have little to do with application integration per se.COMPANY PROFILEyyyy50 - 600 FTELocation: Europe and USVertical: Retail and wholesaleBusiness Model: Omnichannel / customercentric B2C or B2B sale of goodsBUSINESS NEEDSeCommerce has changed the way goods are sold and purchased, and with it, the expectations that customers have – notonly involving the product, but the service before, during andafter the transaction. Retailers now have the need to automateas many key processes as possible not only to reduce costs andtime, but also to ensure customer retention, satisfaction andultimately, remain competitive in the market.CHALLENGEBENEFITSHigh dependency on manual processesy Retailers can considerably reduce their manual processesand maintenance costsToo many efforts to gain a 360 customer viewDifficulties to scaleUnsatisfactory speed of delivery and order managementy elastic.io iPaaS can easily scale along with the business needsy Comprehensive monitoring of all integration flows acrossintegrated systems making it easier to spot and fix any errory Key business data remains available at all timesy Fast project implementation thanks to its ready-to-use connectorsSOLUTIONThe companies went for elastic.io standardized integration platform as it provides a wide range of preconfigured connectors to various cloud and on-premises applications and an intuitive interface with powerful monitoring tools to automate key business processes fast and with minimal development effort.

BUSINESS NEEDThe exponential growth of eCommerce has brought not only new opportunities andchallenges for retailers but has also changed and increased customers’ expectations.Some years ago, it was enough to simply ensure the delivery, now customers expect their orders to come the next day; customer support was onlyanswering questions and then forgetting about it, now retailers need tobuild relationships in order to retain customers. Additionally, managingstocks, warehouses, orders, fulfillment, billing, and shipping has becomeincreasingly challenging as business volume, points of sale, and tradingpartners increase.Retailers can no longer turn a blind eye to unreliable manual processes andsystems that no longer fulfill their business requirements; they need to be surethat their operations are carried out on time and without errors if they want tostay in the game.As a result, more and more businesses are implementing process automation,integration, and interoperability between systems as this can bring importantcompetitive advantage. The ultimate goal is to have a complete overviewof the business, market, and customers and to be able to make fullyinformed decisions, respond timely to unexpected situations and fullymeet customers’ requirements.CHALLENGEIn the age of digital, one may think that process’ automation in the retail industry is a given,yet many retailers still handle a good amount of business-critical operations manually.The range of cases is endless, either because that’s “how we do things” orbecause the data that needs to be exchanged and integrated has incompatible formats. As data has become a highly valued asset , it isn’t enough justto collect it however it is, it needs to be high quality and accessible at all timefrom everywhere. Interoperability and integration between systems isnot only a must but also has to be fast, in near real-time for it to fullyrespond to the business needs.This job can no longer be done manually as it is time-consuming, error-prone,and requires many resources. Moreover, it impacts directly the company’sability to meet customers’ expectations, delays the response time to unexpected situations and hinges the business’ capacity to scale in the future as theold systems are difficult to “connect” to the newest solutions to create a fullyoperational IT ecosystem.

Use Case #1As its business volume increased, a B2B wholesaler of industrial lubricants and adhesives for mid-sized businesses realized that some processes weren’t fully and reliably integrated and automated, resultingon several occasions, among other problems, in stock inconsistenciesand delayed order fulfillment. The company now wants to reduce operating costs, increase efficiency, and automate key business processes by integrating its own and its partners’ ERP systems, its webstores,order and customer management systemsUse Case #2An Italian B2B wholesaler of exclusive, high quality fabrics for smallbusinesses, startups and fashion designers managed a big part oftheir customer’s data manually. It realized that, due to this practice,it was almost impossible to have a 360 overview of the customer,which as a result, limited the possibilities of creating highly personalized and targeted marketing strategies and providing valuable customer care. Therefore, the company decides to go for a cloud CRMsolution and wants to integrate it with their own on-premises ERP,the online shop software and later with logistics.Use Case #3As part of its scaling strategy, a fast-growing B2C business offeringa wide range of quality technology devices decided to expand itsmarket at a European level. In the process, it realized that some of itsoriginal systems, that back in the day, fulfilled key business’ processeswere no longer sufficient. The company now wants to replace someof its core systems (such as CRM, ERP and eCommerce platform)with a more streamlined and cloud-based solutions and integratethem with the existing IT ecosystem.These three customers, just like many other retailers out there, face similar challenges intheir journey to reduce costs, stay competitive, and provide additional value: how can theyreduce manual work, automate key processes, ensure timely responses in every best or worst - case scenario, and gain full and valuable insights into their customers?

SOLUTIONIn the cases described above, the companies realized thatmanual work was no longer sustainable in today’s highly demanding and competitive market. In order not just to reducecosts, but also to meet expectations, ensure quality, retaincustomers, attract prospects, and maximize scaling capabilities, businesses need to automate as many key processes as possible.For this reason, the companies looked for an integrationsolution that could provide a seamless communicationand interoperability between systems, that was easy toimplement, and future-proof.elastic.io’s integration platform as-a-service (iPaaS) provided the companiespresented above with a standardized and out-of-the-box integration solution.As it comes with preconfigured and reusable connectors, it offers endlesspossibilities to connect cloud and on-premises applications for a variety ofintegration scenarios.This was especially useful for our customers in the Use Case #2 and #3 astheir newly acquired systems (CRM and eCommerce platform respectively)were in the cloud, and they needed to ensure the synchronization of essential data between these systems and their existing on-premises ones. Forcases involving various ERP systems, such as the Use Case #1, the integration platform’s flexibility was especially valuable as it provided an easy way totranslate various data formats including APIs and EDI.Additionally, with elastic.io’s easy data mapping and the possibility to schedulethe integration work to run in real-time or at specific time periods in batch,our customers were able to better manage time and resources, and have alldata - new and historic - available and ready to use across all different systems.Moreover, it provided our customers with the safety that more systems couldbe added to their existing ecosystem to fulfill future business requirements.

BENEFITSRegardless the issue a retailer is facing, it is important to remember that, whendoing business with different suppliers, distributors, customers, etc., there willbe, with no doubt, many different data formats to juggle with. Moreover, integrating all those different systems one-to-one, even with APIs, is quite complexand extremely challenging for an effective maintenance. In the long run, handling data integration manually and adding more and more “points” to the integration flow will result in costs increase and long project implementation cycles,harming the business’ ability to scale.By implementing elastic.io’s standardized integration platform , ourcustomers automated a significant number of key business processes, eliminating the need to maintain, transform and re-key dataover and over again, considerably decreasing manual work and yethaving all required data available across all systems.Its pre-configured connectors to multiple applications, databases, platformsand systems in the cloud and on-premises acted as ready-to-use templateswhere any system can be easily “plugged in” and “plugged out” as needed. Asthey are independent of each other, they can be easily modified and adjusted to each specific need.Additionally, its self-service tools allowed our customers to build their own connectors for in-house developed applications within a few days and considerablymore cost-effective. This has been especially useful for our fast-growing customer who needs to modernize its systems and add new applications to theirecosystem as it scales.On top of that, the platform provided various monitoring tools for keeping trackof existing integration flows across all systems, making it easier and faster tospot and debug errors.At the end of the day, the advantages of having a standardized integration platform in place go far beyondprocess automation and reduction of manual work. The implementation of elastic.io iPaaS has enabled ourcustomers to focus their efforts and resources on business development rather than on pure business maintenance, achieving faster deliveries, better order management and extraordinary customer experience.If you’re curious whether the elastic.io Enterprise iPaaS can help you provide your customer additional value byautomating your key business processes, let’s get in touch. We can discuss your use case, your existing strategies andhave a brief walk-through around the integration platform to see if it meets your needs.Your point of contact:Oliver Gebert - oliver.gebert@elastic.ioGmbH 49 228 53 444 221Rabinstrasse 4 DE-53111 Bonnelastic.ioinfo@elastic.ioelasticio

cants and adhesives for mid-sized businesses realized that some pro- . the integra-tion platform’s flexibility was especially valuable as it provided an easy way to translate various data formats including APIs and EDI. .