Sanistaal

The challenge

Sanistaal is in a highly competitive business, where relevant and user centric services on top of their e-business are a must. Sanistaal knew that the ability to develop, introduce and roll these services out to all their digital channels was a requirement to continuously succeed and grow their business.

It is also essential for Sanistaal to have a high level of flexibility and the option to optimize the solution to always perform smoothly from a technical perspective, a user perspective and a business and conversion perspective.

Sanistaal has a very complex business with over 130,000 items, all with unique prices for all of their 25,000+ customers.

They have full stock visibility across warehouses and physical stores and the option to reserve for in-store pickup or fast delivery.

They also offer the customers a range of highly customizable and configurable services allowing the customers to enrich products with their own data, build, configure and control their own stock and warehouses and so on.

The fix

Sanistaal and we, Vertica, aimed for a solution build around best-of-breed components ensuring a technical strong foundation, tightly integrated components and at the same time the flexibility to continuously develop and adjust not only the united platform or individual components in it, but also Sanistaal’s business.

All of the master data and business logic to handle this is in the ERP (AS/400 and SAP) and PIM (Perfion and Hybris) systems of Sanistaal and the solution had to be able to integrate with these, push/pull data and execute logic in real time.

Furthermore, the solution has a number of core components: Elastic Search and dynamically built URLs and pages, engines for recommendations and e-mail and Commerce Server.

Sanistaal uses the same Umbraco-solution for the concern’s other sites: sanistal.pl, sanistal.lv, sanistal.lt and sanistal.de.

When launching the new responsive platform in 2016, a mobile-first mindset was very important to Sanistaal and it’s clear that this has had a great effect on the usability and usage of the site.

The responsive solution is used as embedded content in their apps, and Sanistaal has succeeded in getting their visitors from mobile devices to convert three times better than before.

Sanistaal - Best Technical Solution, Umbraco Awards 2017

How it works

The Sanistaal solution is build around the Umbraco CMS system that is tightly integrated to a range of other components.

All data on the 130,000 products is imported from the Perfion and Hybris PIM systems as well as the AS/400 and SAP ERP systems and stored in the Elastic Search engine delivering all product views, searches, filtering and so on, to the page. It is possible for the customers to enrich products with their own data allowing them to search on these values and have them included when ordering.

Product media is also pulled from the PIM systems through services with built-in caching features to further support the great load times of the solution.

The Elastic Search engine indexes content which allows for full flexible combination of content modules and products across pages that are dynamically generated and mapped to URLs based on indexed data. Content blocks, products and full pages can be dynamically moved and displayed everywhere on the site.

Including product recommendations that are fully integrated throughout the solution. It is also integrated to the e-mail component to also include recommendations here as well as in trigger based e-mails.

The complex business logic, especially around customers, their uniquely calculated prices and delivery costs and times, all takes place in the ERP systems. This is accessed and executed in real time through services layers on AS/400 and SAP. This integration also allows the solution to pull full stock information for all items across all Sanistaal locations enabling the customer to either order regularly, for fast delivery or pickup as click-&-collect in a store.

The solution offers a number of services to the customers, allowing them to fully outsource stock on selected items to Sanistaal among other things. This service is also controlled, configured and exposed to the customers through the solution.

All integrations – both externally as the stock management – and internally against ERP, PIM and other systems is handled through a service based integration layer ensuring the real time integration and full operability of all systems decoupled from other systems. The layer allows the different systems to interact, push and pull data and execute needed functionalities.