Midland Scientific

Magento 2 Implementation + P21 ERP Integration for Growth Acceleration.

About Midland Scientific

Midland Scientific Inc. is a woman-owned, full-line distributor of laboratory products such as chemicals, instrumentation, general lab supplies, glassware, lab consumables, media, measurement equipment, plasticware, reagents, solutions, and much more. They primarily serve the agricultural, educational, food, industrial, and research markets with a sales force that covers the entire United States.

Website

Services Provided

Platform

“With our main concern being customization and needing a complete solution to improve our website functionalities, we were very happy to have worked with the expertise of the Klizer team. Klizer provided migration to Magento 2 along with detailed customization for our specific needs, as well as various new functionalities to help support our growth.”

Rodrigo Neves

Director of Information Technology

Challenges Faced

Initially, Midland Scientific was operating with a B2B e-commerce platform- B2B seller by ECC. It consisted of around 20 percent of the user base online. With 400K products in its inventory, created in P21 and PIM, and all of them published on their B2B eCommerce platform. They have done many customizations on B2B Seller functionalities over the years, yet they did not get the desired results with their Search function – since users found it difficult to find the required product with specific attributes in it. Additionally, the speed and accuracy of the site were not up to the mark either.

And when it comes to Data Integration, there were not many code customization options in their earlier site that acted as a barricade to business growth and prevented from implementing certain growth strategies.

Design & Development

Klizer’s certified Magento developers and designers initiated the design and development stage. We formulated a brand new optimized website with an enhanced user experience to fulfill the expectations of the customers. The design stage also involved an intricate process to provide a fully customizable Magento site to meet the ever-evolving necessities of the end-users.

Midland Scientific chose Magento 2 which supports their B2B features like Company Structure, Quick Order Placing, Multiple Checkout Processes, Account Management, Promotion. From the technical perspective, our developers assured improvements such as valid codes that comply with current web standards, improved functionality, and wider accessibility for the customers.

Solutions

Search

With the help of ElasticSearch and ElasticSuite extension, Klizer implemented a customized search based on Product Name, Category, Keywords, Product Attributes, Customer Part Number, and more.

Customer Registration

Customer Registration is classified into various categories on this website. On a high level, it is classified as Existing Customer for MSI and New Customer.

Company Structure and Company Switcher

An entry for a company is created by a Company Administrator through a new or existing Customer creation process, by which the company is provided with a P21 Customer ID (Company ID).

Invoices

Invoices raised for a particular company will be displayed under the My Invoices module in My Account Portal. This feature helps the customer to keep track of invoices that need to be paid (open) and closed.

Request Quote

This feature helps the registered customer to negotiate pricing by submitting a ‘Request Quote’ by adding a list of required products.

Suspended and Approve Suspended Orders

The orders placed by the customers above their purchase limit were coined as Suspended Orders. The users are now structured based on their roles in a hierarchical manner (i.e.) Administrators, Managers, Default Users.

Item Restrictions

Midland Scientific has some hazardous products which need to be restricted for certain customers. So, the feature of Enabling Request to Buy button instead of Add to cart was quite helpful as this feature notifies the Administrator/CSR, thereby he can decide whether to release the product to the respective user.

Scheduled Orders

This feature is used to place an order at the prescribed release date mentioned by the customer. It also helps the user to select the required Ship-to address while placing a scheduled order.

Tax Exemption

A customer-friendly solution was introduced to enable customers the ability to upload tax documents and avail tax exemption based on their eligibility.

Quick Order and Shopping List:

This feature helps the user to quickly dial in all the products one by one in the product field and add products to the cart instantly. Customers can use their own product number to add the product to the cart. With Shopping List, multiple shopping lists can be handled through this feature. Customers are able to add/delete products on the list.

Sales Reps and Customer Support Reps

Sales Reps and CSRs will have logins on the website where they can select particular customers/companies and place orders for their customers.

PIM Integration

Efficient Product Management

The Products Information that is stored in Akeneo was imported to Magento using the PIMgento extension. Products are classified into two product types; namely Parent Product & Child Product. Child products are managed as normal products in Akeneo and Parent products are created as separate entities. Additionally, the Child products are mapped to the Parent product to ensure efficient categorization.

Synchronized Product Management

The Parent products were termed as grouped products in Magento and Child products were listed as ‘Simple products’. Simple products can be mapped to grouped products and imported to Magento 2 through PIMgento. Klizer also set up Cron Jobs to synchronize all the products from Akeneo to Magento 2 on a daily basis.

Streamlined Brand Integration

Klizer also added brands and created them as entities in Akeneo which are imported to Magento through a separate API. It involves transferring brands and brand images through it. A Cron Job is set up to synchronize all the brands from Akeneo to Magento 2 on a daily basis.

Seamless Category Management

The website is now integrated with an advantage in creating and managing the categories for all available products. This solution enables the store owner to import or export the product data from the local storage files with just a single click.

Conclusion

The Midland Scientific website is now equipped with a completely transitioned Magento 2 store with power-packed integrations & customizable features to delight their customers. The challenges Klizer faced during this project, including enabling the integration between Magento 2x with Epicor P21, were extensive. Yet, Klizer’s strong technical team was keenly able to hurdle through with their expertise.

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