Reply is the place to meet an incredible variety of enthusiastic, passionate, ideas-driven people, who want to make a difference and an impact.Would you like to know more?
Erwin Müller (EM) Group is a global B2B mail order provider of hotel and catering supplies. The brands, VEGA, Hotelwäsche Erwin Müller, JOBELINE, Pulsiva and Lusini are market leaders in Europe and set the standards in the hotel and catering industries. To proactively meet the increased demands in terms of reliability, functionalities, scalability as well as mobile shopping, EM Group planned a fundamental change of their shop systems and of their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Portaltech Reply, a Reply Group company specializing in eCommerce platforms, accompanied EM Group in this process as technical implementation and consulting partner. With Pulsiva the first brand has already been launched successfully on Shopware basis.
With its brand Pulsiva, EM Group provides very reasonably priced items to hotel and catering businesses in Europe following its motto: “Catering supplies shouldn’t cost more”. In addition to highest product quality and competitive pricing structure, an easy to use, user friendly customer experience, creating an optimized customer journey is a central pillar of the Pulsiva concept. Internationalizing this concept was the target of the online shop project.
Therefore the existing, Magento based, German webshop has been replaced und rolled out together with the country specific shops for Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland (German and French), Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium (Dutch and French) and Spain on basis of Shopware.
Following the overarching strategy of EM Group, the Pulsiva project exceeded the scope of the brand itself. The challenge consisted of creating the basis for EM Group’s entire eCommerce activities by setting up a single eCommerce solution integrating 5 brands, 8 languages and 5 currencies.
In this context the central challenges were:
Starting from an extensive requirements list, Portaltech Reply followed an agile development approach, that ensured the necessary flexibility to quickly adopt new features in the development process.
Two custom developed standards – one for EM Group and one for Pulsiva - based on Portaltech Replys own Shopware standard marked the starting point of this project. This layed the ground for an international multi-client solution, addressing the specific needs of EM Group. The direct connection with EM Group’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Information Management (PIM) systems was of pivotal importance. These connections allows for the import of articles, with and without variants, of product features, images, different presentation options, categorizations as well as multi-language capability.
To optimize the customer experience, Portaltech Reply expanded the Shopware frontend in an agile way by several features such as:
The project phases following the succesful realization of the concept for Pulsiva will be dedicated to integrating EM Group’s remaining brands as clients to the Shopware Enterprise set-up. Portaltech Reply’s careful planning and agile adaptability allow to recur to many features already developed, providing for a highly effective and cost efficient result. Already today, modern software technology paired with Portaltech Reply’s expertise and creativity enable Pulsiva to offer a multi-faceted, virtual, omni-channel shopping experience to an international clientele.