inov-8 deploys Codeless Platforms BPA Platform solution
Footwear, clothing and equipment brand, inov-8, has rolled out Codeless Platforms’ BPA Platform offering for order fulfilment automation, synchronising data between its e-commerce channels, courier services and Microsoft Dynamics AX.
“We were looking at integration options between our core ERP system Dynamics AX and direct-to-consumer sales channels and courier systems to enable us to streamline the entire order to fulfilment process,” says Jonathan Emerson, Head of IT at inov-8.
“When we export goods outside of the UK there is often a lot of paperwork to manage, so having the ability to extract the relevant data from Dynamics AX and use BPA Platform to upload the shipment data to the different courier systems allows us to be very efficient at fulfilling orders.”
“We use BPA Platform to transfer sales orders, sync inventory and manage shipments across the different sales channels.”
He adds: “Within the middleware, the Web Service Connector Tool is a great mapping tool for easily being able to transform data between two different sources. We also find the Scheduler Tool and the Call Task function quite useful for converting data sets to XML or XML to data sets.”
“We’ve found it to be quite a powerful tool. We originally used it to connect our e-commerce and courier systems, but we have used it for other sales channels since then, including our B2B portal.”
“We needed a solution to deliver an end-to-end solution for our e-commerce service and BPA Platform has allowed us to achieve that. You don't really need a coding or developer skill set in order to utilise BPA Platform.”
“I think once you've been trained on it to understand the different components and how it works, which we did initially, it's relatively easy for a non-developer to pick it up and use it, which is quite valuable because it doesn't really restrict who can use it.”
“It's sitting there ready and waiting. If we have any future business requirements to integrate other third-party applications or external systems that have an API, we feel confident that we can easily connect those to Dynamics AX.”
inov-8 has recently used the tech for Brexit preparations with its courier integration systems.
“We are very self-sufficient with some of these tasks, but, as you can understand, some of the APIs that we deal with are all very different and can be quite complicated,” Emerson comments.
“Codeless Platforms provides a comprehensive knowledge base for the tasks, which is also useful and very good.”
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