Web-based eCommerce integration into SAP

The Challenge: Royal Cup Coffee was looking for a partner to help them establish an online presence to increase sales of coffee to consumers. They wanted to select a partner that was not only experienced with e-commerce solutions, but that could guide them in selecting the right solution for integrating into their corporate ERP solution, SAP.

The Solution: Vanick Group worked with Royal Cup Coffee to evaluate the requirements and future initiatives to determine the appropriate and most cost effective solution. Consideration was given to existing SAP and 3rd party solutions and based on overall cost and Royal Cup requirements it was determined that writing a custom solution would be the most cost effective and flexible model for Royal Cup’s needs. Vanick also assisted Royal Cup in making other decisions during the evaluation and design process. It was determined that this would be the most opportune time to rebrand the public website since we would be introducing many new people to the site and adding a great deal of new functionality. The group also determined that with a little extra effort we could add AP/AR look-up functionality to the site for existing customers relieving accounting of that workload. Vanick designed and built an ASP.Net solution using SQL Server 2000 as the data store and SAP/R3 V4.6C as the business system. The approach that Vanick took was to centralize as much of the business logic as possible in SAP and use the web application for presentation and persistence. We connected to SAP through the .Net connector using standard functions, BAPIs, and custom RFCs.

The Benefits: The site is relatively new and quantified results have not yet been gathered. However the team at Royal Cup Coffee has some definite expectations of where the return on this project will come from. The first expected ROI is in their first objective, to increase B2C sales through an on-line store. Royal Cup expects to increase their retail sales by 10% through the addition of the on-line presence. The second ROI will come from Customer Service time saved by B2B customers entering their own orders. Royal Cup expects to migrate or deploy 30% of their chain store customers to self-service resulting in 320 FTE hours of time saved per month. Royal Cup also expects to receive benefit from the launch of the AP/AR lookup functionality, but has not yet quantified the expected benefit.