Adam Hall GmbH

The project started for us at the end of 2015 with a 6-month requirement analysis. Within 17 months we developed all of the initial requirements and were able to go live with the new online web presence in November 2016. Due to the complexity, prior to this, a three-month test phase in conjunction with Adam Hall was implemented. Since the go-live, we are now continually developing the online presence.

The implementation included some of our own developments. We would like to introduce a few of them in the following. For example, to some extent, each of the 200 countries has its own article availabilities, prices and sales structure to which the shop must adhere. In addi-tion, each country has its own language combinations with up to 6 languages per country. Here a comprehensive plan was necessary, based not only on subshops but also on an ex-tensive administration and API concept, in order to be able to efficiently administer and maintain the shop. This starts with content and goes beyond articles to customers and orders.

Articles can be listed individually, as sets or as B-stock goods. Depending on the customer, individual items may be hidden or not purchasable. Every customer can also be offered dif-ferent price breaks for each article. Each customer should also always get the best price if, for example, there is an offer available. The prices are already calculated and displayed cor-rectly in the article listing. Regardless of supply country, the availability of an individually selected quantity is displayed in real time. And finally, despite the high dependency on the ERP system, the shop will continue to function in the event of an ERP failure. Our solution to this was a consistent micro-service architecture, as the MS Navision ERP system would have been much too slow to be able to cope with the traffic in real time. Our micro-services be-came a central point of contact for all price calculations outside of the ERP system in order to be able to calculate prices within milliseconds.

The shop has a very high degree of automation in order to simplify the shopping process. This means that every order has already been through a shopping cart splitting process and divided into immediately available items or later available items. For example, if the client is looking for a specific article in a larger delivery, he can see accurately online that this package is on pallet 3 in parcel 5.

Other requirements are that current price lists in a customer-specific format are available via download or automatic file transfer service. The article API must be readable by a per-son to be technically validated. In the event of import problems, caused by for example, er-rors in the data, all errors for an article must be clearly visible and, if possible, all subse-quent errors must be displayed. In other APIs, generally only the first error that occurs is received, so the final result must be debugging. Another feature is that customers can regis-ter via a highly automated process. In this case, the interested party is asked a series of rel-evant questions via an elegant wizard. If the customer is accepted, he can complete his reg-istration via a link to add a password and further details and his individual conditions are immediately available.

We have designed our own recommendation engine to meet the special B2B needs. We generate a personalised newsletter for each customer, which is sent via InxMail. And we have developed our own short link generation, which facilitates the use of links across all languages and the correct configuration of customers based on login, country and browser language.

And, of course, we have placed great emphasis on the shop’s usability. So, for example, the various product presentation requirements of end-users, resellers and event equipment hire companies are all met. In addition, any new features are explained to the user via a guided tour. Even maintenance work is displayed in a user-specific way, so that each customer is well-prepared.