A national auto parts supplier was at a crossroads as to how to grow their digital presence. Do they go with a 3rd party platform plus some unknown amount of customization or go ahead with building a fully customized alternative. If they choose a 3rd party platform which one will best meet the needs/requirements of the business not only for today, but for the future.

BDO Digital has worked with this firm for several years in a tax capacity and the client felt comfortable enough to get us involved to assist in this decision-making process. They understood their shortcomings in domain expertise and relied on BDO Digitals expertise to ensure they were making not only good decisions, but the right decisions for now and moving forward.
 

Challenges with selecting

The company wanted and needed to add online purchasing capabilities to their website. They have a heavily customized front end of their website, and they didn’t want to have to lose/rebuild that effort from the ground up. BDO Digital came in to assist in providing platform agnostic expertise about the market. With this newfound knowledge in hand BDO Digital made a recommendation as to which platform we believed would best fit their needs but left the decision to the customer.
 

Our Methodology

BDO Digital utilized a formal methodology to assist with platform selection. A 3-day workshop session was held with the customers to understand and gather a deeper understanding of their requirements. From these sessions BDO Digital was able to lay out the alternatives as well as the pros/cons of each option. BDO Digital then made a recommendation based on the information provided but left the final decision to the customer.

Also, out of this process it deemed that the client needed easier insight into all the data they were capturing. BDO Digital proposed a set of reports to be created that aggregated this data and would expose it within the new ecommerce platform. This project was able to be executed immediately after the ecommerce platform initial launch had been completed. It allowed the company to better understand market demands/needs and supply the right products to the right customers in a timely fashion.
 

Benefits

BDO Digital’s experience with similar clients helped expedite the platform selection process to quickly find the best solution for the company.

The new eCommerce system will allow the company to manage their business using a modern open-source SaaS application. They will also benefit from having a best-in-breed set of capabilities to allow additional features in the future as desired. The customer is currently maintaining enhancements of the platform and bringing in BDO Digital as necessary to build out new custom features beyond their expertise to build.

BDO Digital’s methodology is focused on a software choice that will meet the functional, financial, and technological requirements of your company. We have the industry knowledge and technical expertise needed to help at every stage of the lifecycle. If you would like more information, please contact us.