Lean ERP and efficient: greenyogashop goes xentral

Before introducing a new ERP system, there are always questions about the requirements. Thus, ruhr.agency first worked out a requirements catalog together with greenyogashop, in which all requirements for the project were recorded.

In addition to order management, invoicing and accounting, the new ERP system should also offer the possibility of article management including product data. The main focus, however, was the connection to the many external interfaces and service providers. xentral offers its own interfaces to Amazon FBA and FBM as well as Shopware, which were set up accordingly by ruhr.agency.

The situation was different with the Avocadostore marketplace: In this case, an interface specially coded by ruhr.agency were used. As a payment service provider, the greenyogashop relies on Mollie, which presented an additional challenge in the project. Because xentral does not offer an initial connection for Mollie. Thus, ruhr.agency developed its own interface, which includes a wide range of functions. In addition to the usual payment methods, an advanced payment via Mollie was also set up for the greenyogashop. The highlight: customers can receive individual payment links from xentral or even automatically receive credit notes from returns. Both processes significantly simplify the daily work in e-commerce.

As mentioned, xentral offers its own interfaces for many third-party service providers such as Amazon. However, this is not always the case for external fulfillment service providers. Here, ruhr.agency had to code its own interface. This provides the greenyogashop with fully automated logistics processes: Customer orders, updates of product master data or the setup of new products, supplier orders as well as transfer orders to Amazon FBA now go out automatically thanks to the specially programmed interface.

On the other hand, xentral offers greenyogashop operators process automation and services that make up modern e-commerce. These include shipping notifications including tracking information, order cancellations, stock transfers, incoming returns or incoming deliveries from orders. To ensure the best possible customer service, error messages from the fulfillment service provider are also sent immediately to IT by email for immediate clarification. Customers have become very demanding when it comes to shopping online. That’s why customer service must also be at the heart of e-commerce. The greenyogashop achieves that with xentral and offers its customers an automatic returns management system. For example, returns notifications from a fulfillment service provider are automatically created as a return and a credit note in xentral. When the credit note is released by an employee, it is refunded to the customer in a fully automated process.

Nowadays, e-commerce does not just mean selling via your own webshop. If you want to run a successful e-business, you have to be present on various marketplaces such as Amazon, Avocadostore or Zalando. Marten Peyser and his employees are well aware of this. Therefore, the planning for further connections to sales channels such as Otto, Zalando and others via the middleware solution Tradebyte is already in full swing and will be implemented in the next project phase.

However, coding the interfaces and setting up xentral to meet greenyogashop’s requirements were only part of the project. A central aspect of any ERP project is the data. Since greenyogashop had been working with a proprietary system for years, the existing data first had to be consolidated and validated. In the next step, they were then migrated to xentral.