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Company Description House of Ireland sells quality Irish giftware and clothing through its stores and through its Internet site. Giftware includes crystal, china and other Irish crafts. Clothing includes traditional knitware, fashion tweeds, kilts, country clothing and accessories. The company has been at the forefront of on-line trading in Ireland since 1996. eBusiness Objectives The company wanted to integrate IT systems with those of their suppliers and shipping agents, to reduce supply chain costs and increase speed of delivery to customers. In addition it wanted to implement an advanced CRM module, encompassing web based transactions, email and phone orders, and to integrate systems with those of shipping agents in order that goods could be tracked from the supplier, seamlessly to the customer. Implementation A detailed strategy audit was carried out, involving personnel interviews, process review and analysis of customer and product sales including both off-line/on-line sales and comparison with best industry practice. This resulted in formulation of the eBusiness strategy and CRM development of the House of Ireland website which were based on much of this information. Having analysed system requirements it was recognised that the company would need a replacement for their existing Intershop platform in order to achieve the aims of their strategy. The new system would have to handle multi-currency support, VAT, complex shipping calculations among other issues. They extensively reviewed and tested a number of potential replacement platforms. As part of this testing some of these systems were modified and implemented partially or in full. After a detailed testing of the alternatives and some additional review work they opted for an open-sourced application based on the Linux platform. The chosen software provided hooks for customisation. The web site and CRM have been developed such that House of Ireland can conduct business with their customers in a more targeted manner. By creating direct access to a personalised website from their targeted emails they made it easier for their customers to access the products, prices and service levels that applied specifically to their customer group. Tools have been developed to import suppliers’ data to update or append products to the House of Ireland online stock system and to implement pricing structures based on categories of customers. Tools were also developed to allow the bulk import of product information and migration of the user database from an earlier site as well as implementation of affiliate software. It was decided to change to a new freight forwarder and use the new supplier’s manifest system and produce the output of that system directly, from House of Ireland. Complexities arose with integrating the company’s Internet orders with those orders originating from their point of sale system. In addition the product database needed to be extended to include customs harmonisation codes to fully integrate the two systems. Work is on-going in this area. Lessons Learnt
Future On the back of their web sales success House of Ireland have decided to develop a "hard-copy" catalogue and have established a digital photo studio and developed graphic capability. House of Ireland is continuing to develop further inter-activity in systems, particularly in the order tracking / freight area. |
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