Integrated ACCPAC/Inciniti Solution Up and Running in Six Weeks

In time for the 2004 Christmas rush, Crabtree & Evelyn of Australia launched their new website with an extensive range of products available to purchase on line, to extend its reach beyond 21 Australian retail, and 500 wholesale, outlets. This online shop offers an extensive range of Crabtree & Evelyn’s luxury bath and body care products for both men and women, home fragrance, sleepwear and comestibles.

Dean Reid, Operations & Logistics Manager, Crabtree & Evelyn said, “We wanted to provide a web store environment to our customers that was secure and had all the offering and feel of our retail stores globally.” With less than two months to get the system up and running in time for the pre-Christmas shopping hike, Crabtree & Evelyn called in systems integrator, Attsoft Business Systems Pty Ltd, to help tackle the intense challenge. It was imperative that the selected system would integrate with Crabtree & Evelyn’s integrated ACCPAC web-based warehouse management system (AWMS), and ACCPAC Advantage accounting system, to ensure optimum fl ow and integrity of information.

Michael Tucker, Managing Director, ATTSOFT, explained, “Say you have thousands of products: if you don’t have an integrated web store/accounting system then you are maintaining two product master fi les which is a huge amount of work for the accounting process. Signifi cant problems can occur, such as pricing getting out of synch.”

Iciniti Provides Secure Payment Capture

ATTSOFT recommended a solution from Inciniti, a third party ACCPAC developer that would be able to develop the web store to integrate tightly with the ACCPAC systems, while linking with all the existing HTML images off the Crabtree and Evelyn website overseas to provide customers with a familiar lookand- feel. The ACCPAC / Iciniti solution also provided automated and secure payment capture via Verisign (as used by the Australian banks) which enabled Crabtree & Evelyn to process credit card details securely over the Internet. This security was considered critical to ensuring customer confi dence in the new web store. Mr Reid said, “With the online environment it’s all about confi dence. We really did not look outside ACCPAC’s environment for the overall solution; we have had many years of successful business dealings and operate our Head Offi ce and National Distribution Centre on ACCPAC fi nancials and ACCPAC Warehouse Management System, AWMS.

That gave us the confi dence we needed to try an as-yet untested new system.” Mr Tucker said, “The implementation time was a big ask, but because the Iciniti product is designed to work ‘out of the box’ it wasn’t so diffi cult. We just had to tweak it a little to ensure the GST function worked correctly, but this was swiftly dealt with. We went live six weeks after receiving the order.”

Quick Results

Mr Reid said, “It’s early days, but the web store is operating extremely well. We’ve only undertaken a soft opening so far - yet without any direct marketing, we were achieving 150 hits a day before the site even opened, and scored a 30 percent conversion rate in our fi rst two weeks. This bodes exceptionally well for next year. “The system itself is proving very robust yet fl exible enough to meet the changing needs of global ecommerce. ACCPAC WMS has tied our front, back and online systems neatly together, enabling the whole ordering/purchasing/delivery process to be completely automated. We look to developing it further over the months and years ahead.”

To read more about Crabtree & Evelyn please visit www.crabtree-evelyn.com.au