Product Catalog Integration For A Large Online Retailer

Overview

VNB assist a large online retailer to integrate and streamline product catalog for 4000 manufacturers with Microsoft middleware BizTalk

Customer Profile

Online bathroom, kitchen and home improvement retailer featuring high-quality, kitchen and bath fixtures from the industry’s top manufacturers at affordable prices. They offer a broad assortment of products including faucets, sinks, showers, bathtubs, toilets, vanities, medicine cabinets and mirrors.

 

Customer Situation

microsoft middleware biztalk

Customer required to import product data from 4000 manufacturers into their “Product Information System (PIM)” and eCommerce portal. They had a point-to-point integration in place to perform this task using custom code, but it became unmanageable, brittle, and damaging to both the IT budget and the organization's ability to meet current and changing business demands. Customer required an integration process that eliminated the pain of point-to-point integration and catered to their future expansions. With 4000+ product partners and various formats of data, it was required to develop an automated integration process to download product feeds from various partners on a scheduled basis, process and transform into canonical format and upload to PIM system. It was also required to download associated product images and documents and provide to PIM system.

VNB Solution

microsoft proof of concept 1 vnb consulting

After conducting a detailed assessment of the client’s existing environment, VNB proposes hub-and-spoke model for automating product catalog upload into Product Information System and eCommerce using Microsoft Middleware BizTalk Server. VNB solution consisted of BizTalk Integration processes to pick up product feeds from designated partner portals, process the data, transform to canonical format and upload to PIM system to pick up and process further for final eCommerce upload. VNB utilized a methodical approach, which included: Leveraging BizTalk on Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to save infrastructure cost and achieve higher scalability. A Site-to-Site VPN connection to access on-premise systems and leverage current investments. Support for multiple products feed formats like zip, excel, xml, text, x12 etc. Components to unzip, decode and parse the product feeds in various formats as well as handle large data files. A robust exception and error handling mechanism to help customer handle the problems and failures. BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) to track data import transactions status

Customer Benefits

  • Getting rid of point-to-point custom integrations and providing highly manageable solution resulted in 55% savings on development cost compared to current process.
  • New solution provided flexibility in terms of adding new partners resulting in faster partner on-boarding time.
  • Hosting the solution on Azure resulted in infrastructure cost savings of 20%.

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