ISAAC | Creatief met Techniek

De Harense Smid Groep - megapool.nl

De Harense Smid Groep is a national retailer of electronics and household goods. The organisation has its own central warehouse and technical service and logistics organisations. De Harense Smid Groep operates in the market under the brand names Harense Smid, Vobis, Prepaid.nl and Harense Smid Zakelijk. A first step in the expansion of the online activities is a relaunch of the Megapool name as an Internet-only brand. Megopool.nl will be the first online retailer with national pickup location coverage.

The Challenge: Create megapool.nl webshop, with a tie-in to the existing SAP system

De Harense Smid Groep worked with ImageMakers (www.imagemakers.nl) to develop an Internet-only concept for the relaunch of the Megapool brand. ISAAC was asked to translate this concept into a concrete webshop. This webshop was to be linked to the existing SAP system, allowing utilisation of the existing logistics organisation. The SAP system integration must be realised in a manner that will also allow it to be used for the launch of harensesmid.nl and zakelijk.harensesmid.nl.

Approach

ISAAC was brought on board the megapool.nl project at an early stage and took on different roles throughout its development.

Advice

Through discussions with both De Harense Smid Groep and ImageMakers, ISAAC assisted in clarifying the functional requirements for megapool.nl. ISAAC provided extensive advice concerning the usability and general 'best practice' aspects pertaining to the conversion of a concept/design to a properly designed website.

Design

During the development of the concept into a concrete site, the emphasis was on the usability of the site and the finer details of the ordering process. In addition, graphic elements from the design were converted by ISAAC web developers into HTML and CSS elements.

• An important element of the site design was the 'choose your own price' concept. This resulted in a site in which the choice for various price levels is brought to the foreground and involves an innovative shopping cart.
• For megapool.nl, De Harense Smid Groep wanted to include a number of dynamic elements in the site. The first element is the Flash menu featuring a sort of fish-eye effect.
• Another dynamic element is the special offer banner that appears at the top of the page. Which special offer is presented in the banner is determined by the customer?s surfing behaviour, one of the aspects added to increase the conversion rates of megapool.nl.
• In collaboration with LaSer Nederland (www.lasernederland.com), ISAAC developed an online financing platform. This platform enables webshops to give their customers the option of making instalment payments. The financing request is then handled online, with changes to the status of the financing request sent directly to the webshop?s back end. Megapool.nl was selected by LaSer and De Harense Smid Groep as one of the pilot webshops for the online financing platform.

Because it was intended to be a reusable platform, ISAAC was given a generous timeframe for the technical development of the platform. The main task of the platform is to serve as an interface to the SAP system, present the product portfolio and allow ordering via megapool.nl.

• In consultation with the SAP consultants, the choice was made to interface with the SAP system via the business connector API. This API provides real-time access to the SAP system via an XML-over-HTTP interface.
• The link with the LaSer Nederland financing platform (www.lasernederland.com) was also included as part of the technical design.
• In order to qualify for 'McAfee SECURE' certification (http://www.mcafeesecure.com/us/) all the OWASP (http://www.owasp.org/) security requirements were addressed in the design.

Implementation

De Harense Smid Groep wanted to have a working megapool.nl site with a very short lead time. ISAAC chose to use the Scrum technique, an iterative approach that makes use of short development periods followed by a progress evaluation done together with De Harense Smid Groep. Through this approach, De Harense Smid Groep was closely involved in the implementation and was able to evaluate and influence results early in the process. As a result of this strategy it was possible to deliver a completely functional webshop within just 6 weeks.

A Java Enterprise architecture based on the JBoss (www.jboss.org) application server was chosen as the basic framework. The choice for this platform results in a stable and scalable solution. Large numbers of users can be handled, and during busy periods it is possible to scale up to multiple servers.

For De Harense Smid Groep, the SAP system forms the core of the business. During creation of megapool.nl there was close contact with the SAP team to achieve the desired functionality for megapool.nl. To simplify the testing of important components, a number of software tools were developed for the SAP team.

The website itself was built using HTML and CSS. Flash™ was used for the menu and the banners, and the dynamic effects were produced using Dojo.

Management

The management of megapool.nl is performed collaboratively by De Harense Smid Groep and ISAAC.

Final result

www.megapool.nl has been online since the first quarter of 2008 and has made a successful start. The easy-to-use site and brand name recognition have already generated a huge turnover in the first half year. De Harense Smid Groep and ISAAC have established a long-term partnership in which ISAAC will provide the technical input and services to help De Harense Smid Groep make Megapool.nl the largest online retailer. Additionally, this collaboration will also result in the development of www.harensesmid.nl and zakelijk.harensesmid.nl.