In an ever-evolving marketing world, we always need to equip ourselves with the latest technology knowledge. It’s well stated in our previous article. This autumn we came across an interesting assignment which elaborated it further.

We were assigned by Sky Logistics and Supply Chain Limited, a reputable supply chain management company in the FMCG and consumer electronics sectors, to design and set up its company website. It shouldn’t be a challenging task to us at all. However, while we met their owner to collect the details on design and content requirements, he told us that his company uses SAP Business One ERP system. He wanted us to set up a function to let its customers’ sales and accounting staff be able to login to Sky’s company website to check their daily inventory balances.

SAP is a big name in enterprise solutions and frankly Chilli has very little experience with such a large-scale ERP system. Fortunately, after talking to our colleagues from Optimo team, we learnt the following which helped us to clear many uncertainties almost instantly:

• • SAP Business One is a system for SME and therefore it’s not as complicated as what we thought
  • Via a standard installation, Sky’s customers shouldn’t be able to login directly to the ERP system at all
  • Above everything else, SAP Business One has the build-in feature to automatically dump inventory report for individual customer in form of xls, csv, html or pdf

We realized that what we should propose to client won’t be an overly complicated system integration project. Instead, it should be a workflow simple and secure enough for their staff to handle reporting daily from the CMS website backstage. Of course, the frontend needs to look professional enough to synchronize with Sky’s tech-savvy corporate image too.

Thanks to the close collaboration between our web designer and our tech men, the website built on CMS including the above reporting function was gracefully completed in just 2 weeks. After a few days of careful testing, security audits and minor bug fix, client was happy to see the company website work exactly as he expected.