Entertainment UK Direct is Top of the Pops with Online Database Solution
Entertainment UK Direct provides home deliveries of entertainment products such as CDs and DVDs for well known online brands. It handles up to 30,000 orders a day, which means that the success of its business relies heavily on its IT infrastructure. The company worked with Microsoft Gold partner Axida, a leading supplier of IT Solutions to the retail industry, to create an e-commerce gateway linked to Microsoft SQL Server 2000, which enables EUK Direct to gain new business and enhance its customers' ability to do business online.
Situation: The entertainment market is one of the fastest growing areas of retail in the UK, underpinned by an increase in consumer spending on leisure items. According to industry predictions, the sector will be worth almost £6bn by 2007. This has been bolstered by the ongoing popularity of formats such as DVD and the latest game consoles. There has also been a shift in shopping habits as consumers get used to technology, and in particular, the use of the Internet.
As a leading wholesale distributor, supplying approximately one-quarter of the UK's home entertainment products, Entertainment UK was quick to see the opportunities that this new retail channel could bring to its business. In 1999, it established Entertainment UK Direct (EUK Direct) as its home delivery arm to provide order fulfilment for many familiar online brands, which now include Virgin's V.Shop, Woolworths, and Tesco.com. EUK Direct is known as a 'blind supplier' which means that as far as consumers are concerned, the entire process, from placing the order online to the arrival of the goods, is handled within the brand of the Web site they are buying from. As EUK Direct is sent the orders it initiates the process of picking, packing, and dispatching of items from its warehouse.
Shipping up to 20,000 orders a day, EUK Direct's priority is to ensure that the process is as smooth as possible. Greg Smith, Head of IT Development at EUK Direct says: "We have a highly complex, high volume business. Without a robust IT infrastructure we don't have a business. When we put a new system in place it has to work."
EUK Direct's standard order processing system runs an application called MailBrain by Sanderson. This receives orders taken from the customers' Web sites on a batch basis. While this remains an effective solution, EUK Direct realised that its potential customers were moving rapidly to XML-based data transactions, as it made it quicker and easier for them to do business online. As a result the company needed to upgrade its own systems to be able to handle this form of communication. XML defines an open and flexible standard for storing, publishing, and exchanging information, such as online transactions. As a standard, it facilitates communication between systems and can also be quickly adapted to serve multiple delivery methods such as pocket computers and set-top boxes.
Smith says: "Our system is solid and reliable but we realised that by upgrading we could communicate better with our customers, and offer them enhanced services such as more timely information on stock and orders."
Solution
EUK Direct had three choices when it came to creating a system that would enable it to offer a better service for its customers. It could replace its legacy back-end system entirely, heavily adapt its existing application, or integrate industry standard technology with its existing IT infrastructure. The first two were considered to be higher cost, higher risk solutions. To reduce expenditure and avoid causing disruption to existing customers, EUK Direct chose the third approach.
To create a suitable solution, EUK Direct selected Microsoft Gold partner Axida as its development partner. The companies already had a healthy working relationship based on previous successful projects. Axida selected Microsoft technology to create the new platform.
To communicate with EUK Direct's legacy application, MailBrain, Axida leveraged the DataTransformation Services present in Microsoft SQL ServerT 2000 to take the XML-based orders produced from the various Web sites and submit them to MailBrain in a format it can understand. The code for the solution was written in Microsoft Visual Basic® using the COM+ architecture, which helped speed development and lower costs.
Development took only four months and the system went live in July 2002. Because the new solution can handle XML transactions, the database is now updated with customer information every five minutes, providing a near-real time e-commerce gateway.
Backups can be carried out while the database is online, ensuring that the information is always available. In addition, the Log Shipping feature of SQL Server ensures resilience by automatically synchronising the database with a backup server hosted in Axida's offices, running 15 minutes behind the primary database. This means that in the event of a disaster, EUK Direct can continue operating with very little impact to its business.
The solution also uses the Online Transaction Processing and Enterprise Manager features of SQL Server, which enable easier data entry and retrieval, interactive queries and analysis, and strong debugging capabilities.
With the fast moving nature of the products in EUK Direct's catalogue and the peaks and troughs of demand, the size of the database and the number of orders processed can vary greatly. The database has grown by 100 per cent over 10 months but thanks to its scalability, EUK Direct's customers don't have to worry about the system keeping up with demand at peak times. Wayne Holgate, Director at Axida, says: "The platform is very scalable so EUK Direct can be confident that the database will be able to cope as its information requirements grow."