Case Studies & Examples

Searle

International Cooling Group multi language, B2B e-commerce website with interactive selection tools.

The client

Searle are part of the International Cooling Group which includes brands such as Dawmec and Raffel. Searle are the UK's leading manufacturer of air side heat exchangers and a dominant force in Europe and indeed throughout the world. They approached Nexus in 2004 to develop an interactive e-commerce site for their existing customers and new customers linked to their existing legacy ordering system.

Background

Searle were initially drawn to use Nexus after seeing the interactive electric motors applications we had developed for Brook Crompton on one of their sites. Searle had already developed a disk based selector system which they wished to transfer to the Internet to allow their users to choose the complex technical details of all of their cooler variants. The idea was to link that to an e-commerce ordering system.

Finally the idea would be to deliver all of this functionality in several different languages and make the system scaleable enough to add more languages and choosers as required.

Implementation

A key part of the initial project phase was to make sure both parties were clear on their individual responsibilities since this project would overlap with existing legacy systems, established ordering workflows and code that had been written for the disk based version of the interactive choosers.

It was therefore essential that a good solid functional specification was produced with detailed use cases.

System deliverables

From our varied experience with manufacturing companies and OEM's we have learned a great deal about how international companies need to trade in the rapidly expanding digital economy, whilst not eroding their existing profits. From the beginning it was clear that ICG had a variety of clients that:

• Had individual group discount structures
• Operated in different currencies
• Were part of territories that had specific pricing issues
• Had territory and customer specific product "specials"

Furthermore the products of which there were thousands had part numbers that were specific to the configurations that were selected. For this reason it was essential that the information regarding the configuration specifications was kept safely with the order. These specifications were essentially a delivery benchmark for ICG.

Administration and processing

ICG need to form a dialogue with the customer over specifics of their orders and so a mechanism was developed whereby customers could.

• Purchase priced items
• Ask for quotes on POA items
• Be advised about the product choices they had made.
• Place orders
• Follow the dispatch process.

Placed orders are processed into the legacy system using existing workflows. Regular updates to the e-commerce server from the legacy system are uploaded via XML so that customers can see their order status.

Customers can be assigned accounts, with purchasing limits for individual users.

Customers can join e-mail newsletter groups depending on preferences.

The administration team can edit product data and link to data sheets.

All of the currency dependencies and discount details are able to be modified by the administrators.

The ICG website is online now.

To find out more about this and other e-commerce applications we have developed. Call us today for a no obligation discussion of your requirements. Alternatively fill in the contact form on this page so that a representative can call to investigate your needs.