March 22, 2005, 2:05 PM —
 Strategy in Practice |
| The challenge |
| The solution |
| Rules for success |
| Things to avoid |
| Questions you must ask |
| Are you a candidate? |
This Best Practices is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.
Deploy a commerce infrastructure synchronized in real-time including an order management system, back office ERP integration, an e-commerce Website, and a phone order entry system within 12 weeks, something that would normally take 8 to 10 months to build.
The company
Ex Officio, formerly a division of Orvis, and now a division of K2, is one of the nation's most successful brands of outdoor apparel.
The solution
Ex Officio's commerce infrastructure is built on BusinessFlow,
multi-channel sales and order management software from MainStreet
Commerce.
What they did
Ex Officio had been running on Microsoft Commerce Server for years and was still faced with an inflexible e-commerce offering and disconnected systems. The company had a new ERP system that needed to be integrated, a Website with dated content, and order management needs that required solid workflow. "To keep growing, we needed to make a change," said Chad Luellen, Ex Officio E-Commerce Manager. "We needed a solution that could be implemented within three months, and we needed it to allow us to get things from the drawing board into the market easily. We evaluated IBM WebSphere along with several other alternatives. The more we investigated BusinessFlow, the more apparent it became that it was the best technology in the market. In retrospect, we most definitely made the right decision both in serving our immediate requirements and in enabling our long term objectives."
