case study
AP21 - Magento Integration made easy
Technology is
supposed to make
our lives easier
In the case of Zimmermann their goal was to free up staff from manual tasks so that they could focus on customer relations, product design and the continual development of the brand. Here's the story of how Fishead helped a premier digital fashion brand become a formidable online presence.
Goodbye boring
busy work
As businesses grow in the digital sphere their E-Commerce platforms inevitably become more complex. With Zimmermann, our goal was to streamline and automate the processes that power interchangeable data between the ERP, warehouse, retail and back office.
By removing the need for excessive data entry, we wanted to free up workflows and give the Zimmermann team more time to focus on what matters. Designing, manufacturing and selling great fashion. Website management and administration can be labour intensive if it's done manually. Ever worse if your brand is a fast moving fashion label with thousands of products. Now add into the mix multiple retail stores, warehouses and international orders. How to make it all work as smooth and seamless and possible?
Through the power of business automation.
Plug and Play
Automation
Fisheads solution was the design of a Magento extension to provide an elegant information sharing process across Apparel 21 and the Zimmermann Enterprise Retail Platform
The extension manages the creation of product listings in the Magento backend, streamlining the workload from a range of demanding E-Commerce tasks.
The extension also manages automated posting of sales data, automated shipping and customer data rationalisation. Unlike many other E-Commerce automation solutions the Fishead Apparel21 extension provides the ability for the website to trade even if the connection between AP21 and the magento site is down, meaning higher business continuity and customer satisfaction.
Warehouse integration
The extension allows Zimmermann to fulfill from one or multiple warehouses and retail outlets. Providing the brand with a number of flexible options:
- Retail staff can now action online orders
- Shipping can come from multiple warehouses depending on stock levels
- The platform can elegantly solve where the closest available stock located.
- Complete stock picking plan based on stock levels and distance.
The business can also set custom stock buffers to manage the issues of lost or damaged stock.
Retail integration
Apparel21's ship from store feature offers powerful functionality, but not the automation required to truly make it a scaleable benefit to enterprise retail.
To conquer this problem, Fishead developed an adjunct model to fulfil orders independently of AP21. This allows the handling of shipping and fulfilment for standard or same day delivery.
The model also handles international currency, orders and shipping, while ensuring all documentation and invoicing is delivered to the correct warehouse.
Even better, the Fishead extension works across multi-site businesses. For Zimmermann, this meant multiple sites facing customers at different geo locations could provide custom information and pricing while feeding into the same reporting and auditing workflow.
Automated product
galleries
Uploading images into a website CMS can be tiresome, particularly if you're a major fashion label with thousands of images to process. Fishead made life easier for Zimmermann by creating functionality within the extension to automatically generate links between images and the products they belong to, turning hours into minutes through the power of software automation. The Fishead Apparel extension can create unique product galleries for each of your stores, giving you the power to merchandise separately to different segments of your global audience.
Feature List
A full list of the features offered
by the Fishead AP21 to Magento Extension
- Automation creation of products in Magento
- Automated creation and updating of customers AP21 – Magento and Magento – AP21
- Automated posting of sales
- Automated creation of Magento product categories and insertion of products into those categories based on AP21 configuration
- Multi warehouse order fulfillment
- Automated application of image assets to products
- Ship from store integration
- Multi store and multi-currency ready
- Distributes workload across multiple servers
- Mirrors AP21 retails stores information with extra metadata such as geographic position etc
- Can perform automated optimized stock picking plans from multiple warehouses per zone.
- Can automatically link products together (upsells, cross sells)
- Inventory override of AP21 reported stock per sku item.
Why Automate?
Automation can be a dirty word in some industries. The idea that giving more of our business workflow over to computers might eventually make us redundant occasionally seems to prevail over the benefits of removing boring, repetitive tasks from our day to day work.
The truth is that people will always drive business, and the most successful businesses are the ones that free up their people power for more creative tasks. Can you imagine, in the age of calculators, tallying up your customers order with an abacus?
That's why Zimmermann engaged Fishead to automate the repetitive process of proliferating their website with sales data and new product listings by automating and simplifying processes between Magento and Apparel21.
If you think your business could benefit from automation and custom built extensions, why not contact Fishead and find out how we can help streamline your E-Commerce platform.
Contact
Fishead Pty Ltd
Dulwich Hill
NSW Australia
Email: info@fishead.com.au
Ph: +61 415 274 174
Mob: 0415274174
ABN 84 000 697 147
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