Digital Supply Model For Global Marketing Company

The Client

Since 1991, our client has become a global leader in providing marketing services by developing innovative solutions to reduce the cost of marketing procurement and customer development, while improving the quality and speed companies can get to market. They employ over 4,000 people in the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Pacific Asia. For over 30 years, various companies have used their services to provide personalized marketing materials to major chain restaurants and stores meeting regional sales and messaging needs.

The Challenge

Our client’s business is helping its customers successfully manage the entire lifecycle of their marketing materials. Global companies utilize their services to source and produce a comprehensive range of printed materials and promotional branded items with the highest quality and efficiency.

The client wanted to leverage cutting-edge e-commerce technology to accelerate and streamline its marketing execution services. For that purpose, they envisioned an end-to-end online marketing supply chain portal that would enable their clients’ global marketing teams to seamlessly manage the sourcing and production of the entire range of marketing materials.

This vision required an extensively customized e-commerce solution tailored to the unique demands of the marketing supply chain management and its execution.

During the course of the project, an additional company was acquired by the client that had similar software capabilities, thus expanding the challenge by focusing on creating a superior software solution between the two, adding features to the selected platform, and migrating the entire organization to it.

The Solution

Optimizely – was chosen as the e-commerce platform for the primary task, due to its powerful functionality and ease of customization. Optimizely is built on the Microsoft .NET technology stack. First Line Software’s e-commerce team, working closely with the customer’s in-house experts and its strategic partner, designed and implemented a complex, unique B2B e-commerce portal product specifically designed to serve a large, globally distributed marketing procurement organization. After analyzing the customer’s requirements, First Line Software’s engineers implemented many powerful custom features not supported by Optimizely out of the box, including:

• Complex order approval workflows
• Spend limits by a user (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) with manual override by the administrator
• Bulk user upload with simultaneous user creation in Optimizely and Active Directory
• Multiple shipping addresses per order
• Centralized billing to the company account
• Custom interface enabling access to Optimizely Commerce Manager for a select group of users (with limited permissions compared to standard access)

The Results

The joint effort produced a robust full-service B2B marketing e-commerce portal that the client can now offer to its largest global customers. It is a unique one-stop-shop solution, enabling international corporate marketing teams to seamlessly manage the sourcing, production, and execution of all of their marketing materials through a convenient, intuitive multi-language, multi-currency portal.

After the merger of the client’s companies, choosing from the available platforms with similar functionality, the client evaluated the convenience and efficiency of the product and settled on the solution developed by First Line Software. As a result, the First Line Software team of engineers’ involvement in the project grew by 20% and we continued to supplement the product with the functionality of the existing systems for the transition of all users to one platform and to work on new solutions.

The second product was a similar B2B portal with slightly modified functionality, focusing on the customer’s store profiles. Just as on the previously described platform, orders are generated by assignment but for customer store profiles that are created in the system on this new version of the product.

A Web-based platform was concurrently developed that provided procurement control managers of different customer departments to control how employees fill out order forms in a table with distribution by multiple addresses, quantities, product names, and other parameters. 

These new platforms are already receiving extremely positive feedback from the client’s customers, and will undoubtedly solidify the client’s leadership in the brand delivery services market.

The Team

Team size: 64

The Technological Stack

.NET Core 3.1, .NET 4.6, ASP.NET MVC, Javascript, knockoutJS, WebAPI, ReactJS, Typescript, MS SQL Server, VueJs, Elasticsearch, EPiServe, Redis, Kubernetes, microservices

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