Sauder Woodworking Company

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1 Sauder Woodworking Company Industry Manufacturing / Furniture Partner BizStream rd Ave Allendale MI, USA Brian McKeiver Co-Owner & Kentico MVP bmckeiver@bizstream.com Background is North America s leading producer of ready-to-assemble furniture, and the nation s fifth largest residential furniture manufacturer. Goals Sauder developed its own custom informational website in 1998 and upgraded it in 2003/2004. The site featured domestic products and imported items from its Global Sourcing division. It also provided a robust repair part ordering system for existing customers, with contact center system integration to interface with Sauder customer support agents. In addition, the site provided dealer locator information for consumers to find where they could buy Sauder products with all content being refreshed and managed through their internal marketing department. The site was an on-premise solution written predominately in Classic ASP, with an SQL database backend. While fully functional, the website s format and presentation was dated and in need of an update. They also wanted to provide customers the option to purchase online and expand their online presence through social media. However, their key goal was to inform consumers about their products, increase brand recognition, and entice their consumers to buy from a trusted retailer. Several development strategy sessions took place to review the current site toolsets and infrastructure, identify gaps, and discuss technology goals for the new site. Rather than develop a new solution from scratch, Sauder evaluated CMS (Content Management Systems) solutions already available in the marketplace. These products provide many features/functions available out-of-the-box. And, while open source solutions like WordPress and Drupal were gaining popularity, Sauder eventually decided to invest in an enterprise level CMS system based on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform.

2 After their broad CMS selection process, Sauder chose to utilize Kentico EMS to create an entirely new website. Their main goals were primarily focused on providing a top-notch fully functional e-commerce website that could feature their products at the highest level and provide a better customer shopping experience. They hoped to provide a rich feature set of e-commerce abilities such as product collection landing pages, detailed product comparison, faceted product search, product quick looks, related products, and an advanced dealer locator. Another key component of the website was the need for a fully customizable shopping cart system. Sauder needed to ensure that all orders placed on the web would integrate with their existing ERP system. They also needed the cart to integrate with third-party systems in order to generate the correct sales tax amount and estimate shipping and freight costs based on their customer s location. A final point of integration was to utilize a tokenization payment service to stay within PCI compliance standards. The Kentico EMS platform proved to be flexible enough to meet all of these needs. Challenges Short Timeline. They would need to deploy a fully functional e-commerce enabled website within a few months of project kickoff. Detailed custom requirements. A completely customizable shopping cart checkout process. Entire shopping cart process had to be fully PCI compliant. A website search feature that could quickly access Sauder s entire line of products by product number, attribute, brand, and search term relevance to provide excellent and accurate results. Integration. All web orders needed to integrate with the ERP system for order entry, order status updates, and tracking numbers. The website must work with social media networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Plus to allow for product page engagement and social sharing. Flexibility. Create a multi-branded website that could share a global product repository and single shopping cart system, yet still preserve brand specific product page templates and themes. Create a site that could be used as a foundation to add additional features in the future.

3 I would highly recommend businesses include Kentico in their short list of CMS evaluations. Solution Phase One BizStream was initially chosen by to provide Kentico Certified Developer training and Kentico Certified Administrator training. The goal of the training was to install a base set of knowledge about how to set-up, install, configure, design, and implement a website in Kentico EMS consistent with best practices. However, once the project schedule for sauder.com was determined, the company knew they would need more developer resources to complete the project within their desired timeline. BizStream was also then brought in to serve as part of the Implementation team. From the first day of the engagement, BizStream resources augmented the internal IT staff s capabilities, satisfying the need for assistance with the overall solution design, Kentico object and structure creation, and most importantly the creation of a customized version of the Kentico EMS Shopping Cart web parts and modules. The specific requirements for the customized shopping cart stemmed mainly from the need to integrate all order and customer data that Kentico generated into Sauder Woodworking s ERP system, SAP. The solution ensured that every order on the website would show up in SAP just as if it was an order on the normal order entry screen within the ERP. Then as the order progressed through the manufacturing process, order statuses were saved and updated to go from the ERP back up to the Kentico EMS instance. This was all achieved through a set of integration SQL Server data tables that Sauder had previously created or was able to modify minimally. BizStream created a set of custom web parts to separate functionality groups of the Kentico EMS shopping cart, rather than using the single built-in web part. They used this strategy because it allowed BizStream to integrate multiple third-party systems with some or all of the checkout process steps. It also allowed BizStream the ability to add a custom look and feel to the shopping cart pages seamlessly. By branding their checkout process, Sauder could provide a streamlined, easy-to-use system for its customers. The custom design also allowed for the placement of related items or items a customer may also be interested in alongside the ones already placed in the cart.

4 The Kentico EMS package has proven to be a solid solution framework that Sauder can utilize to grow its e-commerce footprint. BizStream was also able to integrate with the following systems into the Kentico EMS platform as a part of this project: Third-party sales tax estimation, reporting, and filing service. Third-party payment tokenization service. Custom inventory and shipping-point logic to determine product availability. Google Analytics e-commerce goals and funnel tracking. Custom font service to ensure non-web-safe fonts consistently across browsers. These integrations allowed to implement a full e-commerce solution inside of Kentico EMS without having to modify any of their business processes or existing systems significantly. The platform truly proved to be powerful and flexible enough to handle every one of their business requirements. BizStream also extended the Kentico EMS platform to have a client-side templating engine. This engine, built with jquery, Knockout JS, and WCF web services, allows for certain elements of the client-side pages to load asynchronously. This allowed BizStream to implement features like product quick looks and recently added models, while still maintaining a high level of performance and providing a rich customer experience. In addition to the shopping cart, BizStream also provided assistance on developing product pages, collection pages, and many other page templates of the website. BizStream helped create content, custom page templates, document types, web parts, and modules for the new website. By leveraging their experience with the Kentico EMS platform, BizStream was able to make the pages highly dynamic and easily updatable by the content administrators at. This project was a large endeavor comprised of BizStream staff and Sauder Woodworking Company resources from the Marketing, Business, and IT teams over twenty people in total. Together, the team was able to deliver a fully-functional B2C e-commerce website using Kentico EMS with a quick turnaround. This also paved the way for a continuing relationship that led to Phase Two of the project.

5 Sauder I.T. partners with numerous firms for solution delivery. Our experience with BizStream was a true working partnership dedicated to common goals while actually having fun in the process! I would place BizStream as one of our top vendors of choice. Phase Two In 2013, Sauder rolled out a company rebrand aimed at capturing a new generation of customers. Along with an updated logo, brand identity, and packaging, Sauder required an upgraded web experience consistent with their new branding, featuring unique functionality to improve the online shopping experience. These requirements included mobile optimization, enhanced search functionality to locate specific Sauder products online as well as local retailers, and expanded e-commerce functionality to customize and integrate Paypal Payflow Pro as a secondary (but equally secure) payment gateway. Through Kentico s robust capabilities and the solid relationship the two companies had forged collaborating through Phase One, BizStream was able to deliver on these objectives and much more, including: Furnish Forward Blog Built as an entirely separate subsite with a completely different look and feel within sauder.com. This allows content to be pulled from the main website and put into the blog, within the same admin interface, making it much easier for Sauder staff to maintain and reuse content from other areas of their website. Put Together Lookbook Offering inspiration for how Sauder products could be used in a customer s home, the Lookbook features photos from expert designers. The highly specific design pattern utilizes a tiled, infinitely-loading technique custom created by the BizStream team. This Lookbook approach also allows visitors to purchase products right from these pages; they do not need to try to sort by product categories to find if an item is a bookcase or an organizer. This helps increase conversions and sales since visitors can get right to the product, in a much more visual way.

6 The Sauder Marketing department designed the new site look and feel and overall functionality. The Sauder I.S. team and BizStream turned their designs into a working solution. The talented team BizStream brought to the table helped Sauder reach its project goals. Working together, we combined efforts and allocated the right resources with the right talent to the various development components. Marketing Automation A major upgrade to the e-commerce portion of the site, two specific areas were automated using the Kentico EMS Marketing Automation functionality to improve the customer shopping experience, and ultimately increase online sales: Abandoned Shopping Cart feature While many retargeting solutions have weaknesses incorporating specific product details or photos, Sauder s was created to send a fully personalized to a shopper within two days of leaving the Sauder site with unpurchased items remaining in their cart. The shopper receives an with the exact items from their cart, including images and descriptions. Customer reviews Sauder knows that products with a review are 40% more likely to be purchased. To increase reviews and user generated content on their site, customers are sent an including an incentive to complete a review of the product(s) they bought. The offers typically include free shipping or a percentage off the next purchase. This allows Sauder to capture timely, relevant reviews of their products, as well as entice additional sales from previous customers. Key criteria for using Kentico Prior to tackling the large sauder.com website development project, the Sauder I.S. technical team completed a website conversion exercise with progressivefurniture.com using the Kentico CMS package. This conversion took place in a matter of weeks, and the team was impressed with the product suite. Sauder s Kentico evaluation included three steps: 1. Extensively test the tool for platform compatibility, breadth of functionality, ease of use, etc. specifically looking for any red flags. 2. Complete a deep dive into existing interface points with the current site and determine how to best approach the utilization of this type of tool. 3. Brainstorm the requirements necessary to conduct the final testing. After completing the evaluation using these key criterion, Sauder Woodworking Company chose Kentico EMS for its: Solid, proven foundation for ASP.NET development and platform extensibility. Advanced marketing features combined with best in class content management. Value pricing combined with the out-of-the-box feature set. Built in e-commerce ability for a shopping cart, wish list, my account, product, customer and order management. Social Media Integration functionality.