Architecture Migration Project

Our client is an American manufacturer and an award-winning skincare brand utilizing a Consumer Connected Commerce business model. This worldwide company employs 500+ people, has more than 300,000 enrolled independent consultants, and over two million preferred customers.

CLIENT'S CHALLENGE

Intertec has a 10+ year relationship with this client. The client’s company is growing rapidly and their SQL server legacy system licensing was very expensive and could not keep up with the tremendous flow of data.

Their sales organization is large. The representatives needed to manage orders, client contact data, sales, commissions, and reporting metrics efficiently, in real-time, and this was simply not possible with the current system.

The company’s system improvements included the following objectives:

Ability to pay sales commissions weekly instead of monthly
Timely and accurate reporting of all sales metrics
Ability to make marketing, sales, and promotional decisions quickly and responsively
Reduction of time and effort needed to correct system errors
Immediate processing of credit card payments

To further sales support, the company wanted their representatives to be able to maximize use of their Salesforce CRM to provide them with highly desired customer insights such as who is buying what, how often, sales trends, and even identify possible problems. These updates could take up to an hour and the reporting was not as robust and complete as it should be.

Ultimately, the client needed to upgrade from their current batch process legacy system, which regularly took 45 minutes to an hour to update, assemble, and process data, to a state-of-the-art real time data system, giving their employees swift access to data and reporting required for Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

Intertec assembled an expert team to examine, plan, and analyze the client’s systems and technologies. This team explored the best possible solutions to make the client’s goals possible as well as scalable. They proposed a staged approach in consideration of downtime / business disruption in which they upgraded the applications sequentially.

Intertec migrated this client to Event Driven Software — promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events. Intertec accomplished this by utilizing Apache Kafka, Google Cloud Platform, and Streaming Architecture. All of the client’s ecommerce now funnels through Kafka which speeds up data transfer, improves data accuracy, and reduces overall cost of support.

VALUE OBTAINED

The client’s migration was completed successfully and encompasses many benefits, to not only the actual client, but their independent consultants and customers.

The client now has access to quick and accurate reporting. Because of their Google Cloud model, they have completely eliminated ALL of their legacy database licensing and excess servers.

The sales representatives now have access to timely and sturdy sales and customer reporting complete with insights into customer buying habits and behaviors that were never before possible. Time spent troubleshooting orders has reduced significantly affording them more time to focus on sales & KPI.

The new architecture is extremely stable and has eliminated frequent outages. The cost of the outages was significant due to the manpower to correct the issue and order issues caused. The economic models for this project demonstrated a series of measurable benefits as follows: