Case Study of ERP Implementation

Achieving seamless operations with Magento and Acctivate

Global United Furniture sells its trendy furniture on Amazon, Wayfair, and Houzz. They keep track of their sprawling inventory and orders through Acctivate, an ERP system that’s the backbone of their operations. However, their online shop, hosted on the older Magento 1, was out of the loop, and not integrated with Acctivate.

Our task was twofold: not only did we need to update their store to the newer, more powerful Magento 2, but we also had to weave a tight-knit integration between Magento and Acctivate.

4 months

Duration

2 people

Team

Scrum

Methodology

Magento 2

Acctivate

Platform

From challenge to solution: direct database integration

At first, we figured that the issue could be solved with Acctivate’s API for Magento. It seemed to be the perfect bridge for our integration needs. However, it turned out, that the API’s capabilities were pretty limited — not enough to achieve what Global United Furniture required.

After some brainstorming, we decided to dive straight into the heart of Acctivate, its database. This meant getting to grips with the ins and outs of how Acctivate operates. In the end, we crafted the integration with a set of bash scripts, tailor-made to bridge the gap we were facing.

Automated order and inventory management

We stumbled upon another hiccup: the way Acctivate and Magento view products and orders didn’t always match up. In some cases, these in Acctivate could differ from those supported in Magento. Thus, we had to identify all such cases and address them.

To streamline things further, we decided to clear out any Magento modules that were double-checking stock levels. Since Acctivate was now handling inventory management, these were no longer needed. In this way, we ensured that Acctivate could function as expected without Magento interference.

Two-way integration between Magento and Acctivate

As a result, we created an integration between Magento and Acctivate that works in both ways. What does this integration do?

Syncs product orders with their estimated delivery time. It also considers whether the products are in stock and whether there are any backorders.
Syncs orders from Magento to Activate and vice versa.
Tracks all activities with orders, such as product editing, and removing/adding products. Processes partial and full invoices, as well as payments for invoices from QuickBook, and all other data related to orders, etc.
Allows for bulk order history export from Acctivate to Magento with correctly assigned customers.

Simplified workflows and reduced manual efforts

We’ve simplified and sped up the work processes and automated some of them. This specifically concerns the integration with ERP.

Previously, they manually copied orders from Magento to their ERP system. Now this process is automated and bidirectional.

When an order is created in Magento, it’s automatically imported into the ERP system. Next, all changes to the order (editing, payment, status changes, etc.) are synced back to Magento, where customers can track all these updates.

Our team has also developed product stock synchronization to ensure the data is always up-to-date. Additionally, we ensured support for some custom fields, like the arrival date of a new batch at the warehouse.