LOREM GmbH distributes technical papers, office machines and accessories throughout Switzerland. With its own fleet, the LOREM service team repairs large format printers throughout Switzerland directly on site; a typical family-owned Swiss SME that maintains long-term customer relationships through personal contact, high quality and consistency.

The core business works well, but the business is still feeling the changing times and is coming under pressure with regard to digitalization:

• CI/CD: The website was outdated in terms of design and did not properly reflect the company
• Missing CMS:The technically outdated e-commerce system was not developed in such a way that the page content could be easily adapted
• Old technology:The slow loading speed provoked a worse than possible placement in the search engine rankings
• Manual processes:The e-commerce process was very manual (e-mails were generated) and caused the same amount of effort in the back office as an order placed by telephone
• certification:The official sales partners criticized the quality of the website and the eCommerce processes, with a negative impact on the partner status
• No customer portal for customer self-service:Requests for updates on orders always come via email or telephone, which puts additional strain on the back office.

To integrate the legacy ERP into the stack, we used the SelectLine Mobile API and implemented a series of custom macros for missing data. The product images are obtained from an FTP.SelectLine

All master and transaction data such as products, catalog data, images, orders and web portal-active customers are synchronized with the portal at regular intervals. A “connector tool” acts as a bridge between the event-based Unchained Import API and the legacy and FTP systems.

Write commands such as new customer registration, portal functions such as updating addresses or sending an order were built with the Unchained Work Queue. If a write command cannot be sent, the Work Queue attempts to resend the data with a time delay using an exponential backoff procedure.

This approach ensures that the web portal always operates at maximum performance and can also cope with ERP downtime without the customer noticing in any way. We call this "local-first ERP integration".