Challenge

Cajun Grocer is Louisiana's premier store featuring the widest selection of quality, authentic Cajun & Creole food products, original Louisiana cookbooks and the best Cajun, Swamp Pop and Zydeco music Louisiana has to offer. To further expand and develop the business beyond the home state of Louisiana, Cajun Grocer sought to develop a web enabled e-commerce solution to allow customers to initiate a review of catalogue items, make purchases, and track their purchases from a CajunGrocer.com website. BrightStar and Cajun Grocer partnered to develop a centralized website, which would enable customers to experience a comprehensive web site store in all respects similar to visiting the store's retail locations.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Overview

Cajun Grocer required a simple, easy to use e-commerce site that would provide full content and product management capabilities and allow customers a way to purchase authentic Louisiana and Cajun food products. The site needed to be able to track which product pages the customers visited and store the information for analysis of customer preferences for profiling purposes.

To eliminate duplicate entries into their financial and inventory systems the on-line store needed to be fully integrated with these systems.

Solution

BrightStar, in conjunction with CajunGrocer.com personnel, designed and implemented a custom website for the purchase of Cajun and Louisiana groceries. BrightStar also worked closely with CajunGrocer.com personnel, who provided the mapping of their business processes. They also provided us with comments relative to the input and content as they appeared on the web pages. BrightStar provided strategic, creative and development services along with off-the-shelf product selection and integration. A custom application was integrated with selected off-the-shelf software to fully integrate the web store with the financial and inventory systems eliminating the need for duplicate data entry.

As part of the deliverable, BrightStar put together a comprehensive support and content management training program that would allow CajunGrocer.com personnel to easily determine best processes for updating and managing content of the site. All training methodologies were documented to ensure complete knowledge transfer.

In the planning and development phases, BrightStar and CajunGrocer.com conducted a detailed assessment of CajunGrocer.com's existing technology infrastructure. Based on the results of the assessment and a thorough understanding of the customer's vision of the future, the team determined that deploying the store front offered by their back office systems vendor would be expensive and exceed the project budget. BrightStar suggested and developed a system utilizing MS ASP, MS IIS, SQL Server, Cold Fusion, CyberCash, and eKart.

Results

As a result, BrightStar developed a dynamic web store that is simple to use and allows customers to easily view and modify their purchases at all times. BrightStar provided CajunGrocer.com with in-depth training and documentation for content management and system support.

Benefits

- Prior to the project, Cajun Grocer's customer base was restricted to those that could go to their physical locations and limited phone and mail order purchases. The easy to use website for purchasing authentic Louisiana food products broadly expanded their customer base and customer access to their products.

- As a major benefit of the website, Cajun Grocer now had a database of customer information and product sales enabling them to easily identify the best selling merchandise as well as providing trends analysis to aid in properly maintaining their inventory.

- Custom integration with the financial and inventory systems saved CajunGrocer.com approximately $200,000 in licensing fees. Additionally Cajun Grocer was able to reduce by 45% the transaction fees paid per transaction to Value Added Networks by utilizing the Internet as a transport and reducing their dependence on a single system transport with little or no dedicated alternative transports.

- Prior to the integration, the financial and inventory systems were stand-alone with an identified inefficiency due to manual reconciliation of both systems. Integration of the financial and inventory systems reduced costs by eliminating duplicate data entry.

Lessons Learned

The project team initially intended to use the storefront products offered by their back office vendor to help reduce system complexity and integration costs. Early on in the planning phase, when alternative approaches were compared, it was determined that the preferred method of using these storefront products would be much more expensive due to the cost of licensing fees and implementation costs than would a custom solution. Cajun Grocer was presented with the information on the alternative approaches and agreed with BrightStar that a custom solution would be more cost effective and provide more flexibility without greatly affecting system complexity.

The process of a thorough requirements phase of the project validated some core business decisions based on the operational requirements and enforced the selection of the tool as the right tool for the right job to be completed in the best possible practice.