Merck a German multinational science and technology that provides infinite solutions to solve the toughest problems in life science in collaboration with the global scientific community. Merck has been around for almost 350 years and invested a total of € 2.0 billion in research and development in 2016, with 59 manufacturing sites, 100+ distribution centers, and 60,300 employees across 66 countries.

Merck is looking for a global Ecommerce platform that can support multiple countries to handle the transaction by separating each admin interface and only managing their respective Orders and Fulfilment. In addition, the need to connect to a global payment gateway that can support all five countries together and connect to its separate own SAP system to handle the integration with more than 2 million products and customer data. This process should seamlessly flow between Ecommerce and SAP system.

Some regulated product of Merck requires all consumers to have a permitted license document to purchase the item, which is approved in the SAP system by Merck’s RMTC team. SAP will need to push approval back to Ecommerce so consumers can check out and purchase the item.

Ecommerce and SAP connection is called and controlled by SAP on the fly when the client is logged in to the Ecommerce platform to see their customer data/type and look to different prices depending on their group. Furthermore, can also be able to look at the time delivery estimation, request and approve the quote, and what payment method that customer can use to purchase the item.

Kemana’s goal is to develop an Ecommerce that can support Merck’s business requirements which needs a very stable and secure system to support their business. Kemana will also help them by replacing the manual work that Merck is currently doing when taking orders. Ultimately, to develop an Ecommerce system with best practice UX to support the Ecommerce early adopter client to be able to use the ecommerce system.

Challenge #1

With the purchase flow’s complexity along with the security and safety for the regulated product, the system needs to handle validation carefully. Due to product restrictions that need license/EUD within the dealer/supplier account

Challenge #2

Quote, Order, and Address approval, as well as customer restriction and life cycle, should be maintained from SAP and pushed to the Ecommerce system for Approval

Challenge #3

On the fly API call needed to take in place to show the information with maintaining a reasonable speed of browsing and the server health

Furthermore, the system also needs to handle the quotation threshold value to be pushed to SAP, and assigned to respective sales person within Merck’s company.

SOLUTIONS

Our team customized the quote, order, customer group, and specific pricing. We also added a license/EUD interface for the regulated product, furthermore, we carefully reviewed the business logic and requirement for SAP API Call to streamline the process and get a better experience that will not jeopardize the performance and UX of the system.

Kemana works closely with the SAP team from 4 countries to conduct integration testing and execute end-to-end testing with the user to make sure all the data required from both systems is transmitted and consumed effectively to process the data.

What’s more, the server environment is also tuned up properly to handle heavy API call between both system.

THE RESULTS

The Ecommerce platform was able to synchronize with SAP while maintaining a good UX for all vendors and suppliers of Merck.

The vendor/supplier can now make partial delivery from the quotation and choose which product should be processed first as a sales order. In addition, Merck can set and see the RDD (Request Delivery Date) from each vendor/supplier and track the shipment status.