Microsoft Dynamics and Episerver Commerce case study. Eason & Son. Increasing Revenues by over 100% with Omnichannel Commerce.

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1 Microsoft Dynamics and Episerver Commerce case study Eason & Son Increasing Revenues by over 100% with Omnichannel Commerce Case Studies A

2 The way to compete with a giant is to capitalise on your size - be nimble and more in tune with your customers. Discover more For more information on this and other great case studies go to madetoengage.com/our-work Client Highlights Episerver Commerce Episerver Find Episerver Perform, Reach and Campaign Episerver Insight Dynamics AX Integration Avensia Storefront Savvy Loyalty Intergration Sage Pay Pi Project Overview Like many traditional retailers, Eason have felt the Made to Engage effectively answered all pressure from large online competitors, and for a of these requirements and more with the large bookseller the competition is formidable. implementation of Episerver - including its key components - CMS; Commerce; Perform Eason needed a platform which would (Behavioural Merchandising); Campaign deliver complete marketing and ecommerce (Automated Marketing) and Find (Search). merchandising agility - enabling them to blend product and promotional content throughout Eason has developed a strong vision for a the site and related campaigns. seamless omni-channel experience for all customers. Made to Engage and Episerver are Most importantly, Eason required a platform making that a reality. that would support seamless integration to their back-office systems (Dynamics AX) for customer, order and product data, enabling us to use this data to develop personalisation and automated product promotion strategies which would drive relevance and overall customer experience. 2 Made to Engage Eason & Son 3

3 Eason have developed a strong vision for a seamless omni-channel experience for all customers. The Plan This was an ambitious project, both from a technological and a timeframe point of view. The entire build had to be carried out in a time frame which would allow Eason to capitalise on the largest retail window of the year, stretching through black Friday to the end of the January sales. In terms of technology, the project required a seamless integration between Episerver and Dynamics AX. This was achieved via the Avensia Storefront Dynamics AX integration accelerators and direct integration to Microsoft CRT to manage the synchronisation of carts, orders and customer profiles. But with the current technology stack at Eason, this brought about its own challenges. Commencing the build in July, Made to Engage prioritised functionality that would allow Eason to make good headway for the site going live in October. In line with our agile approach to projects, Made to Engage s Episerver Commerce specialist team worked with Eason IT to establish the required integration patterns before delivering increased marketing capability and enhanced customer experience over a series of iterative delivery sprints. 100% 4 Made to Engage Eason & Son 5

4 A platform for unified ecommerce performance, delivering data driven, personalised customer experiences across channels. The Technology The full Episerver suite includes a CMS and Commerce platform, along with additional functions called Perform, Find and Campaign, which integrate to provide exceptional customer experiences. We coupled this with Eason s current ERP, Dynamics AX, bringing Eason s brick and mortar systems seamlessly into their digital landscape. Episerver Perform, and behavioural merchandising enables Eason to use machine learning to automatically present recommendations to consumers based on their purchasing and search behaviour on and offline. Additionally, Episerver Campaign, built for marketing and transactional s, will ensure every consumer of Eason will feel like their most important and valued customer. 6 Made to Engage Eason & Son 7

5 Black Friday / Cyber Monday Weekend Late Late Toy Show Christmas Period (Nov 1st Dec 25th) Post-Christmas Sales (Dec 26th Jan 14th) 60% 39% 49% 75% The Results In many ways the figures speak for themselves. The revenue has increased enough to more than justify the efforts but also provide a clear indication of the impacts that would be expected of the iterations to come in the year ahead. 68% 36% 54% 100% The Future With Episerver Insight now in place, Eason can leverage enhanced digital intelligence through Episerver Insight and user experience research to enhance their new solution. The combined and dedicated team of Eason and Made to Engage have big plans for 2018, continuing work to further develop the platform, bringing us closer to achieving our goal of delivering an exceptional omni-channel experience to each of Eason s highly valued customers. 8 Made to Engage Eason & Son 9

6 Episerver Insight The Technology Architecture Episerver Find Episerver Campaign Episerver Profile Store Episerver Personalisation Engine/ Machine Learning Algorithms Episerver CMS Avensia Storefront CRT Dynamics AX for Retail Episerver Perform Episerver Commerce Episerver Reach Episerver Find: is a search engine used to index and search the 800,000+ products stored in the catalogue. Episerver Perform: provides customers with personalised recommendations based on their past browsing and purchasing history. Episerver Campaign: provides campaign management and personalisation based on customer profile and browsing data. Episerver Reach: enables real-time personalised content and merchandising in for increased relevance. Episerver CMS & Commerce: is the engine on which the e-commerce site is built on. Avensia Storefront: connects the CRT and Episerver product catalogues with real time synchronisation of the 800,000+ products store. During the synchronisation process it patches books with metadata received in a feed from BDS. Commerce Runtime Engine (CRT): Instances of CRT serve as an abstraction of AX data for each retail channel whether that is a retail store or in our case the online store. Microsoft Dynamics AX: is Easons choice of on premise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform which manages all aspects of the business including warehouse, retail store inventory levels, pricing, promotions, point of sale transactions and financials. 10 Made to Engage Eason & Son 11

7 AI Driven Personalisation 75% 12 Made to Engage Case Eason Studies & Son 13

8 What Eason Have to Say Eason already had invested in skills internally within Dynamics AX for retail the previous year. We looked for a new Ecommerce platform that would work seamlessly with Dynamics AX and would provide our marketing teams with the agility and capabilities they needed. We selected Episerver with the Avensia Storefront connector for AX, with Made to Engage supporting us on the ground with what was a complex but very successful implementation. We knew we didn t have all the skills necessary in house to make this project work. The success of this project is about having the support of a proactive partner on the ground, one who deeply understands Episerver CMS and in particular Episerver Commerce. Made to Engage fulfilled this role with great success. Delivering a complex ecommerce project such as this, with a tight deadline for Black Friday, required a highly collaborative approach. The team was made up of our own AX, marketing and ecommerce teams, supported by Made to Engage and Avensia, leaning on direct support from Microsoft where necessary. We re proud of how we overcame the many complex technical challenges we ve seen in this project and even more proud of the improved customer experience and business results achieved. We can now confidently say, we have the strong foundations in place to support our continuing roadmap for a customer-centred omnichannel strategy to establish Eason as the market leader in its space. - Michael Robinson, IT Manager at Eason 14 Made to Engage Eason & Son 15

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