Another Crown Go Live!

I'm excited to announce that we successfully pushed JS Phase 2.0 to production last night! A special thanks to Mengyu, Carrie, Steve and especially Sam and Terry who all worked hard to get this project over the finish line!

If you want to see FoCUS in action, you need look no further than JS. After we successfully launched phase 1.0 in May of this year, 3/4 of JS's stores jumped on board and have been Utilizing the solution. Meanwhile, we have been gathering insights to Strengthen the value of their eBusiness platform to get the rest of the stores to join the party. Since August of this year, our team has been simultaneously supporting the initial release (Utilize) and building version 2.0 (Strengthen). This new version 2.0 release brings important features that will enable the remaining JS stores to start Utilizing the corporate eBusiness platform, giving JS much better leverage and reach going forward. The fact that we pushed hard to get Phase 1 live in May (even with only partial adoption from the stores) gave us a solid five months of real-world utilization under our belts to tune the application and refine the requirements to give JS the best solution possible just over 1 year from the original project kickoff. As we move into our next Utilize phase, we already have exciting plans in the works to Strengthen the platform even more next year.

For those who are interested and want to read on, here are some of the cool things we added with the 2.0 release:

• Product Lists. Customers can now create and manage multiple lists of frequently purchased items in the system for easy re-ordering by any user associated with the customer's account. Stores can bulk-load product list spreadsheets into the system for new customers.
• Order History. The eBusiness site can now communicate with three different types of back-end Point-Of-Sale systems in over 100 different store groups around the United States to show customers a live view of the Order History for their account. Not just online orders, but ALL orders the customer has placed with a store: online, over the phone or at the counter in the store.
• Store-Specific Popularity: All product search and browse results in the system are already sorted by a corporate popularity score to push the most popular items to the top of the list. With the 2.0 release, individual stores can now override the product popularity scores that drive the sort order when their customers are logged into the site. This allows individual store groups to drive traffic towards the products and product lines that they are most interested in selling.
• Persist Shopping Carts: A customer can add parts to their cart from one computer, then login from another computer a few hours later and find the contents of their cart as they left it.
• Switch between Stores: After logging into a store, customers can now very easily switch their session to shop in any other store within the same store group. If a customer sees that a product isn't in stock in their usual store, but is in stock at the store on the other end of town, he can switch to the other store (bringing his cart with him), complete the transaction and pick the will-call items up the same day.
• Line Item Notes: Some customers need to be able to associate notes with each item they purchase, and have those notes show up on their invoice. We extended the shopping cart to handle these line item notes, and pass them into the Point of Sale system when the order is submitted.
• Customer Part Numbers: You have to love the complexity of B2B eCommerce. Not only does every customer have their own negotiated pricing for products in each store group; some bigger customers also insist on identifying parts using their OWN part numbers instead of the JS part number. (Maybe I want to call that motor, "A10", and I'll do a lot more business with you if you let me call it "A10" when I order it.) With the 2.0 release, we now communicate with the back-end Point of Sale systems and allow customers to search for parts using their own part numbers, add items to their cart with their own part numbers; and even ASSIGN their own part numbers through the website.
• Store-Specific Options: JS stores are all independently owned, and they often don't agree on how they want the site to behave. We took several of the most divergent feature requests and implemented them multiple ways - giving the stores the power to configure how they want the site to behave. For example: can users sign up for an account online, or do they need to come into a store? Do we want to show actual quantities in stock, or just a "IN STOCK" message? Can we online credit card payments? Now the stores can decide. 

I hope you are as excited as we are about the ways we are helping JS grow their business!