Furniture giant reinvents e-commerce to get back on track

See how a leading U.S. furniture retailer maximized its e-commerce platform and increased revenues through Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Challenge

When its website crashed on a major holiday, this large-scale furniture retailer knew there was an underlying issue that needed to be resolved. It turned the challenge into an opportunity to strengthen its e-commerce presence, improve system performance and customer support, reduce risk, and provide a more stable foundation for the company’s online platform.

This company had completed a Microsoft Dynamics AX and Sitecore implementation, but the production environment did not meet their expectations. Instead, it resulted in poor user experiences, poor system performance at checkout on the e-commerce site, extended periods of downtime, and loss of revenue.

Frustrated by these negative outcomes, company leadership reached out to our Fusion team for an architectural assessment of the Dynamics AX and Sitecore installation and an actionable plan to solve these performance and reliability issues. This furniture giant needed to evaluate its installations to make improvements and, ultimately, better serve its customers.

Solution

Like many enterprise organizations, this client selected Microsoft Dynamics to efficiently drive its operations, finance, customer service, and e-commerce platform. However, the implementation did not follow best practices, and that’s what subsequently led to issues.

Our team set to work to evaluate the existing system configuration and performance characteristics against both Microsoft and Sitecore best practices.

The high-level, symptomatic issues that needed to be rectified included:

Slow or erratic loading of pages on the website
A lengthy checkout procedure that would sometimes time out, causing customers to abandon the online shopping cart
Unreliable checkout process
Extended system downtime required to perform maintenance and updates

With the evaluation complete, Fusion developed a detailed roadmap of recommendations and a suggested implementation to move this furniture business forward.

A deeper dive

The recommendations addressed performance, stability, operations, and efficiency. Each recommendation was categorized by:

Expected usefulness
Implementation timeframe
Implementation risk
Resource commitment

These classifications allowed the organization to prioritize enhancements based on business importance and impact. Fusion advised which configuration and deployment changes would result in immediate performance or stability enhancements, with a view toward long-term support of the platform.

With a roadmap in hand, our client was able to evaluate the system to make the changes necessary to support its strategic vision with e-commerce.

Outcomes

Our architectural assessment provided our client with an awareness and prioritization of opportunities for improvement.

After completing the action items we recommended, this mega-retailer was able to maximize the performance, reliability, and potential of Sitecore and Microsoft Dynamics AX and also leverage data and content in a more efficient, effective way. The holistic solution provided short-term stabilization and a path for long-term support.