The client got in touch with The Nth Bit Labs team to transform their legacy system which was built for inventory and order management for a single channel retail outlet. Thus making it a challenge for their existing customers to use the solution for multi channel retail and still having the ability to maintain unified inventory, order management and fulfilment.

Clearly the business goal was to enable the brands and online retailers to be able to sell on multiple online platforms and provide them the required integrations and still be able to manage unified inventory and order management. 

The technology bottleneck was that the existing system was very tightly  coupled with a specific technology platform and the entire backend solution i.e. order management system, CRM, ERP was based on an open source system. With growing demand for unified commerce, the client was propelled to create an automated solution that allows to organise the inventory operations with a centralised log-in to manage all sorts of operations.

The project’s major goals was to create an integrated solution that supports:

• Provide support for integrating multiple different online platforms.
  • Synchronise Orders From Different Online Channels to a Unified Dashboard.
  • Update Order and Dispatch Status from the Dashboard to Online Channels.
  • Manage Cancellations.
  • Synchronise Product Catalogue and Inventory From a Unified Dashboard to the Online Channels.
• Provide the ability to integrate to different online channels rapidly.
  • Define a generic interface between a unified dashboard and the online channels.
  • Decouple platform integrations from the core system.
• Fault tolerance.
  • Ability to retry operations and recover from failures.

With the evolving business needs, retailers need an omnichannel solution to compete in today’s competitive market. Providing an omnichannel commerce operation can be a difficult undertaking. Our approach was to simplify the complexities of omnichannel, enabling the client’s end user to meet growing consumer demand anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

The Nth Bit Labs team tackled the problem and broke the system down to create an abstract interface between their legacy system and any future or existing system the client wanted to integrate. In order to create a unified view of the inventory across different channels and for the solution to work robustly within a multichannel sales environment, the team enabled loose coupling between the different services, and therefore, the retailer can make changes with practically no disturbance to the other parts of the system. 

Another aspect of the tacking problem was to take care of the exchange of the data between the different platforms a retailer or brand is selling their product. Since every platform can have a different database schema, we ensured that the platform would pick the data in their preferred format. This was done by creating a normalisation layer between the applications that would allow easy exchange of data in the required format.

After an extensive development phase, The Nth Bit Labs team was successful in delivering the omnichannel technology platform. The solutions were capable of delivering business insights, order management, purchase management, and catalogue management capabilities.