The life of a wine merchant is forever flowing. From sales, marketing and distribution, to staying on top of busy orders, Meridian Wine Merchants is definitely in high demand. And their sales order processing needed to keep up. To speed up the process, we assisted in automating the receipt of their orders through direct customer and eCommerce integrations.
Meridian Wine Merchants is a market leader in the South African wine marketing and distribution industry. They have won the PMR Diamond Arrow Award and have won first place as distributor and marketer in ‘Wine, Spirits and Beverages’ every year since 2013! Meridian represents more than 35 of the top wine brands in South Africa.
A large percentage of Meridian Wines Merchants’ orders come from the South African retail sector. Moditar created direct EDI (electronic data interchange) integrations for Pick ‘n Pay and Shoprite Checkers to automate the receipt of orders as unprocessed sales orders in their ERP. Next, we stepped in to provide integrations to the various eCommerce platforms that provide them with orders from other clients. All integrations were completed through the UI in the Utopia integration engine, so there was zero code required and every integration benefitted from platform tools like advanced message queueing, message prioritisation, data mapping, and data validation.
“Moditar have looked after our retail integration for the past 4 years and I can highly recommend them. Customer service is great, and they have handled our ERP transitions with ease through that time” Jacques Botha, Meridian Wine Merchants Financial Systems Analyst.
Meridian Wine Merchants made a transition from Sage Evolution to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central a few years ago. Due to Utopia being a cloud integration, the workflow was retained in the cloud and we simply had to reconfigure the connection into the new ERP. This saved significant time, against the alternative — which was to start developing a new ERP integration from scratch. This is a major benefit of using a cloud-based integration iPaaS.
The majority of integrations were from various eCommerce platforms (WooCommerce, Commerce7, and custom-developed ordering sites). These included both Meridian-managed sites, but also customer-managed sites. This created an interesting array of workflow requirements, where we had to cater for:
- Single product code/ multiple units of measure
- Multiple product codes/ single units of measure
- Using eCommerce for order fulfilment procedures
- Utilising ERP for order fulfilment procedures
- Product and customer validation
- Separate orders to different ERP’s depending on various shipping criteria
- Email notifications from ERP and not eCommerce
- API (application programming interface) generation for custom solutions to communicate with their ERP
Other integrations included direct EDI integrations with major retailers in South Africa. These require connections to custom REST and SOAP APIs. To keep the data of these customers updated, we implemented data cleaning steps and notifications on validations. This ensured that bad data in an order (like an expired product code, or empty field) would not go unnoticed; document errors are reported so that they can be fixed and ensure that all orders are accurate and captured successfully.
We continue to assist order automation for Meridian’s customers, using the Utopia integration tool.
Once Moditar managed the integrations, the project resulted in:
- Better alignment of data, reducing rejected orders
- Reduced overhead on their server performance
Need to develop an eCommerce integration? Or have a unique situation that requires expert integration? Contact us for your customised solution.
