A Case Study

Located in the picturesque ‘honeymoon’ city of Santa Barbara, California, Gold Medal Wine Club is a common name amongst the wine enthusiasts across the United States. Since 1992, GMWC has been serving wine-lovers with excellent quality wines procured from small production, award-winning wineries from California and the world’s best boutique wineries. These highly allocated, hard-to-find wines are usually not found in stores.

The situation
Until spring 2008, members’ account management at GMWC, was a collection of disparate processes. Although, Microsoft Dynamics RMS and an add-on by Elypsis called the WineClub Manager were used to run the day-to-day operation, these applications were not integrated with the ecommerce website. This lack of integration resulted in gruesome redundant tasks and the sales team had to feed everything in the WineClub Manager - manually. The process had its disadvantages:

• No integration, no synchronization
• Erroneous records
• Difficulties to manage choices
• Ineffective promotion

At that time, Gold Medal Wine Club was looking for a completely automated solution that would systematize the entire business process along with the online storefront.

The solution
The RMS integrated solution developed for Gold Medal Wine Club is a programming marvel in itself. Not only did it provide a feature-rich ecommerce platform with customized options, but the data-synchronization process between third party add-on, RMS and the online store was seamless also. To achieve 3-way synchronization the developers at LAN Services had to do the following:

• Design the ecommerce architecture with real-time data processing
• Develop an APIs to integrate it with RMS and the third party add-on
• Establish multiple bi-directional channels from the online store
• Device the automated data-transfer mechanism for scheduled processing
• Develop a strategy for initial customer database synchronization with shopping cart

A fully customized web integrator, also known as ‘Winelink’, communicates back and forth between the online store, the third party add-on and RMS. Thus, any change made in the third party add-on or RMS is updated in the online store – automatically.

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