Future Electronics
Commerce Server Scales to Accommodate Five Million Products in Future Electronics’ Online Catalogue
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Company Overview
Future Electronics has been distributing and marketing semiconductors and electronic components for more than 35 years. Since it first set up shop in Montreal in 1968 the company has expanded to encompass 155 offices in 35 countries throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Business Challenge
As the only vertically integrated industrial electronic components distributor selling to customers of all sizes worldwide, Future Electronics has carved itself a unique niche in the marketplace. The company’s mission is to “Delight the Customer” – a commitment which makes outstanding service, support and inventory choice key elements of its business. As such, Future Electronics relies on its e-commerce Web site – essentially a searchable online catalogue – to help customers find the parts and components they need. Customers plug in component types or brand names into the portal search engine, and the site generates a list of results by category and manufacturer.
“We focus on maintaining a live, ready-to-sell inventory for our customers, with 24-hour access to product information, and we warehouse some five million parts,” says Bob Seney, Solution Architect, Future Electronics. “But the application we were using for our catalogue could only house up to 500,000 items online. Because we want our customers to be able to find exactly what they want easily and quickly, we needed a portal solution that would let us include a lot more inventory online, as well as value-added information such as technical specifications and upgrade availability.”
Future Electronics was using a Java-based commercial application to organize the content of its e-catalogue, with product data housed in an Oracle database running on Unix eight-way servers. While its IT team had customized the technology to accommodate 500,000 parts online, Future Electronics was unable to configure the architecture to support product items beyond that number. The company wanted the flexibility to list millions of products online.
The speed and ease of catalogue maintenance was also an issue the company wanted to address. With a large product inventory, Future Electronics was re-loading its catalogue every two weeks to freshen its online offerings. Each re-load took about 72 hours using the previous application, so finding a solution to help make this process happen more quickly was a key concern.
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Solution
In June 2004 Future Electronics’ IT team presented corporate management with a return on investment proposal for deploying new technology to make the online catalogue more cost-effective, comprehensive, faster to use, and easier to maintain from an IT perspective. By September, the company had chosen Microsoft® Commerce Server 2002 based on a proof-of-concept testing phase that boosted the number of parts that could be catalogued online from 500,000 to five million.
“The customization we’d done to the previous commercial application made the upgrade path practically impossible – we figured we’d have to build something ourselves from scratch to get the functionality we were looking for,” says Seney. “We didn’t want a packaged product – we wanted a tool set to speed up the development of our Web application. But when we tested the viability of Commerce Server and got five million parts into the online catalogue, it convinced us we were making the right choice.”
Future Electronics brought in Microsoft technology partner, Avanade, to help it rebuild its e-commerce portal using Commerce Server 2002 with Feature Pack 1. Future Electronics, with the help of Avanade, migrated its Web environment from Unix/Oracle to a Microsoft-based platform including Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and SQL Server™ 2000, and built the new site using Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET.
“We needed to do a certain amount of customization – setting up our own tables to handle inventory, for example – and we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose an upgrade path like we had done previously,” says Seney. “The key benefit of bringing in Avanade was to ensure long term viability – together we made sure that before we started developing anything, we built a framework over the Commerce Server API to allow for smooth upgrading.”
Part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, Commerce Server 2002 is designed to help companies rapidly deploy personalized portals. Features within Commerce Server 2002 provide capabilities for catalog management, order processing and merchandising, as well as user profiling, content targeting and advanced business analytics. Tight integration with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET enables developers to take advantage of the Commerce Server 2002 pre-built business components and tools that support both COM/ASP and Microsoft ASP.NET development.
“We worked with Future Electronics’ IT team to deliver the solution in a compressed timeframe – after the proof of concept was done, the entire upgrade took us about four months,” says Louis Fournier, Senior Solution Developer, Avanade. “Essentially, we kept the same Web site functionality with some minor modifications, like extending the search capability and implementing a custom pricing policy, and set it in a new framework based on Microsoft .NET, Commerce Server and SQL Server.”
Business Benefits
Using Commerce Server 2002, Future Electronics has created a more comprehensive, functional, cost-effective business portal that is easy to maintain.
“We had hit a technology bottleneck in trying to improve our online inventory listing to five million parts, and provide customers with faster, more comprehensive search ability,” says Seney. “Commerce Server really helps us meet these needs. On the IT side, we love its open infrastructure – all the libraries of functions are completely documented and free for us to modify as required. And the abundance of training documentation Microsoft provides means it’s easy for us to bring someone up to speed on the Commerce Server platform and supporting it thereafter.”
Helping Improve Sales Opportunities
With a mission to “Delight the Customer”, Future Electronics wanted to provide a wider choice of inventory through its online catalogue, and have the flexibility to update the catalogue as needed.
Commerce Server 2002 is helping the company improve sales opportunities by providing an infrastructure that allows for five million parts to be listed online. This increase is enabling Future Electronics to cross-sell products more easily, and improvements to the search engine are speeding up the process.
“We literally jumped from 500,000 to five million parts with the site refresh, and the search speed on five million parts is sub-second per transaction – before, this process ranged from three to five seconds,” says Seney. “We want to empower customers to search our site for exactly what they need, and Commerce Server gives us the ability to provide a full technical index running in the proper format, so customers can filter their search through technical attributes. We never had that ability with our old site.”
As well, Commerce Server 2002 has enabled Future Electronics to streamline the process for re-loading the online catalogue. Whereas in the past it took 72 hours to do a re-load, with Commerce Server, the process now takes about two hours.
“Being able to re-load the catalogue on a nightly basis is a huge benefit for us in terms of flexibility,” says Seney. “This was impossible before, because re-loading all the data took too long for it to happen that regularly.”
Improved ROI
Moving to Commerce Server 2002 required Future Electronics to update its back-end with Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000. This is resulting in improved return-on-investment for the company.
“We have the same volume of users on our site, yet the hardware needed to support Commerce Server is much less costly – we’re able to run the same load in terms of software on a four-way machine versus an eight-way machine,” says Seney. “Plus, we’ve found the licensing cost of SQL Server is much lower than Oracle, which saves us even more.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Avanade Canada, call (416) 641-5111 or visit the Web site at: www.avanade.com
For more information about Future Electronics, call (514) 694-7710 or visit the Web site at: www.futureelectronics.com
