Nominee: Orckestra
Province: Quebec
Provide a brief description of the Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative.
The client had been using a system that lacked a centralized product content repository and a way to decline their offerings into their 35 markets. They needed to: -Develop an integrated e-commerce platform that streamlines and optimizes The Clients’s marketing content creation, sharing and global deployment of campaigns assets and media. -Minimize infrastructure costs across their current and future data center requirements. -Expand globally quickly in order to test and enable new markets / geographies. -Scale on demand based on peak usage scenarios. -Increase conversion rates and average order value (skin type, skin color etc.) with personalization and segmentation.
Describe what makes this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative original or innovative.
The client needed to drastically change their website from a simple online catalogue to a full multi-functional website with a sophisticated transactional platform and content management system implementation. Orckestra used SharePoint 2010 as the solution foundation to integrate Microsoft Commerce Server 2009, Endeca IAP 6.2 and Overture. “We are a top beauty company with a 50-year history of producing on-trend products for every woman,” said the clients’s Chief Marketing Officer. “The changes to our website put our irresistible products at the forefront. The new client website not only reflects our great beauty product portfolio, but also showcases the ease of shopping online with the client customer base.”
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s sales or revenues. What changed?
Provide evidence of measurable improvements in sales, revenues, cost reduction, etc.
Orckestra deployed a full CMS managed e-commerce site for the US market. This has evolved to a Worldwide SharePoint solution integrated with Windows Azure that allows the client to easily create CMS e-commerce sites for each of their 35 markets with deployment times of one month versus the previous 12 months. The combined streamlined marketing and online merchandizing operations empower the marketing teams across the world to not only update their own CMS e-commerce sites with their local language, but also to create sophisticated and effective campaigns without having to go through the IT teams. “March was a record sales month for the client, but know that our company is in a great position to have record breaking months several times throughout the year,” said the clients president and CEO. “We are celebrating our 50th anniversary, and our company has never been stronger. Our international markets account for more than 70 percent of our revenue, while the the clients opportunity in the U.S. continues to appeal to women from a wide variety of backgrounds from Gen-Y to Baby Boomers.”
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s efficiency. What changed?
Provide evidence of how customer efficiency was increased.
E-COMMERCE / CONSULTANT PERSONAL WEB SITE Multi-channel foundation: the client can interact on any kind of platform from internet browser to mobile/tablet device. New channels can be added as opportunities arise. -Profile System: provides tools that display a single view of customers and orders for easy tracking and support. The client can build customized campaigns tailored to their context. -Order System: Enables secure, quick and efficient order management and tracking. -Split shipments and tenders: enables multiple payment and shipment methods for a single order. -Customizable payment methods: allows managing multiple methods of payment -Named baskets: Customers can save their baskets for later use or create wish or watch lists. -Web services: The Orders System uses service architecture in order to easily send orders to a line-of-business system.
How did this Solution, Service provided, or Initiative improve the customer’s ability to serve its internal and/or external clients?
Provide evidence of the improvement.
SHAREPOINT CMS Overture leverages the CMS capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server to empower an e-commerce solution with an intuitive, browser-based content management tool. It provides a fast web editing system with capabilities that allow editors to publish content in multiple languages, in context, within minutes and without touching any technical tools -Rich Page Editing: When logged-in, authors will recognize the SharePoint Action Bar at the top of every web page. This bar gives access to the different functionalities of SharePoint and also triggers the Overture Rich Page Editing functionality. This environment, directly presented in the web browser, is so intuitive that non-technical specialists or editors can be up and running with content editing in minutes -WYSIWYG Text Editor (What You See Is What You Get) Features: -Multilingual Capabilities: Allows for content editing in multiple languages in the editing interface through Variations and Site Collections replication, an Overture core feature. -Content tree and content organization: The CMS shares the same user interface for editing typical site content such as company information, product catalog offerings or images, in multiple languages. -Content Scheduling and Archiving: Users can specify documents or products that should be published and when they expire.
In what ways does this Solution or Service Provided go above and beyond industry norms and expectations?
The resulting solution by Orckestra is one of the largest global SharePoint publishing sites available. There are 12 Web Front Ends leveraging SharePoint web services hosted on 4 backend SharePoint 2010 servers. The components include: -Page management using SharePoint 2010. -Product Management using Overture (*see below). -Advance search: Endeca IAP 6.2 application definition with partial and baseline index update processes feeding from the client’s Commerce Server catalogs, along with custom search filtering, guided navigation and Merchandizing Workbench implementation (landing pages, custom cartridges, business rules, search reporting) . -Microsoft Commerce Server 2009: Sub-systems for the client’s implementation (catalogs, profiles, orders custom fields, marketing target groups and promotion rules, reporting). MOSS custom site definition along with custom features, web parts, workflows that will constitute the clients’s SharePoint E-Commerce foundation. -BizTalk Server 2009 used to integrate the web site infrastructure. *Natively, those products do not interact together and the different data stores are not connected. Overture bridges the gap between the three platforms, creating a powerful e-commerce solution that provides agile content and merchandizing management capabilities, while allowing broad extensibility for future enhancements.
How does this solution further your customer’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
With Windows Azure, the client can scale its size in a pay-as-they-grow structure rather than paying up-front fees for costly serves and terminals. This has an immeasurable savings in terms of environmental friendliness and in terms of cost savings for scalability. A large part of this project was empowering individual sales reps to create and maintain marketing campaigns without the need of IT support. They were able to create these paper-less campaigns online and thereby reduced to amount of paper catalogs in circulation. Theclients’s improved website facilitates and promotes ordering online which decreases the use of transportation costs (sales reps are encouraged to communicate with their clients via e-mail and other electronic means). It encourages paperless transactions and celebrates the use of environmentally friendly electronic transactions.