Drupal Commerce development for historical artifacts shop
MDM, part of the Richard Borek Group, founded in 1893, is an international collectibles trading company based in Braunschweig. MDM is a world leader in precious metal collectibles, with over 1 million satisfied customers and over 700 employees. The Richard Borek Group also includes Richard Borek GmbH & Co. KG (Borek for short), the Société Française des Monnaies (STEFM for short), the IMM Münz-Institut - Institut für Münz- und Medaillenkunst GmbH, Archiv Verlag and alta Dienstleistungs, GmbH.
The challenge
Archiv Verlag was the only platform in the client’s ecosystem of webshops that wasn’t connected to the SAP for centralized order processing and SKU management. Thus, the client requested a platform upgrade to ensure the revamped Archiv Verlag online shop operates quickly and efficiently.
Delivered value
We consulted the client on the best-fit ecommerce CMSs and offered Drupal Commerce as an alternative to their legacy Jimdo-based platform. Afterward, our team delivered a responsive Drupal Commerce platform for Archiv Verlag within short timeframes. We also managed the platform’s configuration with SAP, ensuring efficient product management, payment, sales, returns, and refund procedures.
The process
Lemberg Solutions has already helped MDM accomplish several other projects for their system of online shops, including a component-based Vue3 development, which covered front-end development, UI/UX design, QA, business analysis, and project management, and SAP ECC system maintenance and improvement for MDM.de with the help of a Retail/Ecommerce custom solution.
The primary purpose of the current MDM project was to find the best-fit ecommerce platform and migrate the Archiv Verlag webshop to it. The client also wanted to integrate the Archiv Verlag online shop with SAP for more convenient order and SKU management.
The Lemberg Solutions team working on the Archiv Verlag project consisted of an SAP consultant, a Drupal developer, a Drupal and Ecommerce expert, a BA, and a PM. The client’s team consisted of a Product Owner, a Head of Product, a Front-end developer, and a QA engineer. We also collaborated with the client’s Content Manager and Ecommerce expert to adjust our solutions to their needs and requirements.
The cooperation started with the solution discovery. During this phase, our team delivered a detailed project estimate and built a clear development roadmap and architecture, including SAP integration. Then, we moved on to the development phase. All in all, the project took five months to complete. The discovery phase took one month, while the development lasted three months. After the development phase, the customer ran the user acceptance testing, which took around one month.
We worked in 2-week sprints, providing a demo for the Product Owner at the end of each sprint. This way, the Product Owner could track the work performed more efficiently.
Regarding the front-end part, we offered the client to choose a ready-to-go template to cut time and costs on development. We customized the theme to ensure it perfectly fits the customer’s platform needs.
We also engaged our SAP expert to integrate SAP with the Archive Verlag Drupal Commerce platform. We adapted the OData interfaces according to the parameters of the SAP system and created jobs on the SAP side for automatic processing. The integration allows the client to process orders and manage products on their platform centrally. This means the orders from each MDM online shop are automatically forwarded to the SAP, where the client can manage all payment, sales, returns, and refund procedures in one place.
Our team also adjusted Material Master data for importing to the front end. We used the existing integration architecture we had built for other MDM online shops and customized it for Archiv Verlag to optimize the process.
Besides SAP integration, we also integrated the Archiv Verlag Drupal Commerce platform with payment methods Credit Check, Saferpay, and GoIban to provide users with various payment options. For email marketing automation, we introduced Emarsys and Econda for analytics tracking. Additionally, we integrated the Archiv Verlag platform with a consent management system according to the requirements of GDPR.
How it works
I am extremely pleased with our collaboration with Lemberg Solutions (LS). They integrated seamlessly into our processes, and both my team and I have learned a great deal from them. I highly value LS's expertise and flexibility.
