Floriculture Distributor, SharePoint, & Customer Experience

This global leader in all facets of floriculture has distribution capabilities in all of the major world markets. Heavily focused on research and development, the company has introduced many innovative, award-winning varieties to the world of horticulture with a commitment to sustainable practices. The company has a customer portal and a supply portal. On the supply side, customers can buy seeds and the company can purchase plants from them.

Customers had difficultly placing orders because of technology hurdles. The order processing spanned across several programs including custom .NET ordering systems and pages of SAP. This could cause the company to lose business. Furthermore, the need for someone to program in Java, .NET, and ABAP resulted in high support costs.

The company wanted to streamline its single user experience by using a single username and password sign-on format. The company owns SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server, and they wanted to create their customer portal by leveraging the technologies they already owned. In order to do this, SPR would build, deploy and scale the company’s SharePoint environment.

The company’s CEO wanted to engage in a multi-channel strategy with its customers. They chose SharePoint because of improved search and cost effective extranet licensing. An improved customer experience would save money by leveraging Microsoft technology that the company already owned.

Using SharePoint as a platform, SPR defined the architecture for single sign-on with SAP for anonymous users, registered customers and suppliers, employees and sales force. We designed and built a registration application that will allow external users to log onto WebTrack. We also engaged in defining security, ongoing process, and standards for governance.