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Hi, I’m Adam Judd from Discover IT. We are a Web solution company and Kentico Gold Partner based in the UK.
For those of you that don’t know, Sage 50 is a very popular accounting software package primarily for
Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the UK.
Discover IT have previously developed Sage 50 integrated solutions with other e-commerce platforms.
We’ve recently completed a completely integrated solution for Kentico CMS.
Today I’m going to give you a quick run-through of how we achieved that.
To give a brief introduction to Sage 50 Accounts.
Sage 50 Accounts is a very popular accounting software package targeted at SMEs.
There are 814,000 companies use Sage Accounting Software in the UK alone.
And to give a brief introduction to Kentico CMS….
Fully extensible Content Management System
Includes a fully developed E-commerce platform Company formed in 2004
Now in version 7, Our solution works on Version 6+
More than 15,000 Websites in 87 Countries Major Brands Using Kentico CMS
Now lets take a look at the construction of a SME with an online selling presence.
With every organisation that sells there is the ‘front-end’, the
public facing, side of the business. The shop window.
In which the following tasks will probably occur….
Product catalogue “display”
Register customers
Organise sales
Take orders
Conduct Customer Relationship Management Marketing
Promotions
and this will apply, just as much for a brick and mortar shop, or a telephone-sales business, as for an online
store. Or indeed a shop which has a combination of all of these sales channels.
However, except for perhaps a very small business, the “front-end” needs to be tightly integrated with the “back-office hub”
There are also requirements which you may not of considered.
Every company has to do these boring everyday tasks, some of which do not belong in a web store (for example Profit & Loss, payroll).
Others task you might find in a web store, (such as managing price lists and inventory).
However… what if there are multiple sales channels (i.e. telephone, mail order, different web sites, such as eBay, Amazon,
or even a physical store) then managing inventory control
and price lists becomes more complicated.
So, is it not enough to be able just to see your orders in the web store’s admin panel?
For a one-man-band, with a low number of orders… possibly.
This will probably be OK if the customer is only selling through the web site, and then are no other sales channels
For anyone running an enterprise larger than this, then they are more than likely
using some kind of accounting software for these tasks.
So there is a requirement for an accounting system.
You have an online store.
What are the options to integrate?
You can have someone manually transfer the order details from the website to the accounting system.
There are a surprising number of companies who adopt this approach.
The limitations with this approach are pretty obvious.
If the web store is selling at significant volumes (say 100 orders a day), this could keep a single employee busy full-time.
Also this approach would be prone to costly data-entry mistakes.
The next option would be to have a data import / export. This could be done with an Excel or CSV file, of all orders.
It would typically be scheduled to run overnight.
This would eliminate the man-power, and data entry mistakes associated with the manual approach.
The 3rd option is Real-time integration Orders:
Well using the import/export of spreadsheets, orders will be transferred to the accounting system when run.
With real-time integration the orders will appear in the accounting system immediately. OK in itself this is not the biggest benefit.
Although it may mean slightly more efficient order processing.
Stock Display: However, what if you want to only promote on your website what you can ship?
Take the following scenario… Someone has placed a large telephone order on one of your products so you no longer have them any in
stock. The web site won’t know about this.
This could result in a series of conversations with your customers to explain that they won’t receive their order.
Not a great customer experience.
However with real-time integration, this will never happen.
Customer Authentication: Real-time integration will mean that the customer’s data is ***-up-to-date in both the
web store and the accounting system, which is a nice to have.
More importantly the two systems know who each customer is, so we can do the following tasks as well:
Price Lists: For B2B transactions is often a requirement to have a tailored price per product for each
customer (rather than, say, a set 5% discount on all products).
By retrieving custom price list information from the accounting system this becomes possible.
Credit Control: If you need to allow payment on account, which is essential for B2B sales,
Also you have the ability to put the Customer on hold, so they can’t make web orders, from one place,
if you no longer wish to do any business with a customer who is not paying.
Product Details: Once connected in real-time all the product details (description, weight, standard price),
can be changed in the accounting system and reflected everywhere. Which safeguards the miss-selling of products at wrong prices.
You now have the ability to manage the site from one place.
So, we know what we want to do, and why we want to do it, now I’ll talk about how we integrated Sage 50 and Kentico.
Integration is always a concern when using a third-party tool,
Fortunately Kentico is not a ‘black box’, it is highly extensible using Kentico Custom Providers and Events to insert our own code.
The next concern, is the Kentico website will be in a data centre. The accounting system is likely to be within a company network.
This is where its always been, and having such sensitive data in the cloud is rightly or wrongly likely to be resisted.
Creating a web service to allow these two systems to communicate was the ideal solution for this.
The third challenge… Kentico being a website, is by definition, a multi- request environment.
Whereas Sage 50 being based on COM legacy components is single-threaded
The solutions was to… Make the web service application operate as a single-threaded apartment (STA)
Can now be implemented quickly, as the challenges have been overcome.
So there is a two way conversation going on.
There is data that needs to be sucked out of the accounting system at various points.
And there is data that needs to be sent to the accounting system.
Retrieving the data. On customer login… The customer status, pricing, stock, and catalogue data needs to be retrieved from the accounting
system.
Updating the data On customer registration, the updated
customer details need to be sent to the accounting system.
On placing an order the order details will be also be sent.
To take one example in more detail…
What happens when a Customer Logs in…
An existing customer logins to the Kentico site.
The screen is from a solution with have developed for a company called EcuTek, who develop tuning software for cars.
Kentico Custom Event Handler overrides the OnAuthentication method to make Web service call to the Sage Connect service.
Then the Sage SDK call retrieves the Customer Data (such as… Address, Credit Balance, Custom Price List).
Customer Data is returned from the Accounting System, and the Kentico Customer Data, Credit History, and Custom prices are updated.
In Summary….
E-commerce is big and will continue to get bigger and more important, especially in the SME area.
Although desirable, it currently is difficult to seamlessly integrate the front-end and back-end of a store. We’ve done all this using Kentico and
Sage 50, it works extremely well, and our customers are very pleased with the results.
In the future web stores integrated with backend systems well become a requirement for e- commerce solutions.
If you are interested in Sage integration we would be happy to work in a consultancy role, or co-development role, or are even provide advice.
Also if you are interested in integrating with another accounting or ERP system (for example Sage 50 US edition, Mamut or
Quickbooks) with Kentico please talk to us, as we believe we will be able to provide valuable assistance with this.
The link to our site with more details is accessible from the Kentico Marketplace. Or from www.ecommerce-connect.co.uk
If you’ve got any questions, please visit the site, our contact details are there, and we are happy to organize a demo for anyone that is interested.
Thank you for you time today.