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Cohesive Customer Experience for Commerce
Bio-Techne Corporation comprises biotechnology and clinical diagnostic brands. They work to empower researchers in Life Sciences and Clinical Diagnostics by providing high-quality reagents, instruments, custom manufacturing, and testing services. Over the last few years, Bio-Techne has focused on acquiring new manufacturers and labs — and now faces the challenge of combining all of these legacy eCommerce solutions into one cohesive customer experience.
Bio-Techne engaged Bounteous to be the implementation partner for their internal One-Web Project (www.bio-techne.com) which will bring all brands under one roof using Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.
With 14 brands in their group, Bio-Techne wanted to consolidate their product catalog and online commerce business into a single, modern experience for their myriad customers. Previously, Bio-Techne customers would have to visit individual brand sites and order products in different experiences, sometimes with fax machines, in order to complete a set of purchases for their projects.
Not only did they want to consolidate their shopping experience, they wanted to utilize their relationship and recommendation data to offer related services and replacement products that cross brands and suppliers. These connections, driven by a massive technical product database, help their customers make safe and effective purchasing choices and build Bio-Techne up as their trusted supplier.
Recently, Bio-Techne has integrated their punchout experience into the new one-web platform enabling customers to purchase through their distributors web experiences. Elastic Path, Bio-Techne and their punch out partners collaborated extensively to create an excellent shopping experience.
Business Issue
Bio-Techne’s goal was to integrate newly acquired brands under one roof and minimize disruption with their legacy system. The product set in each brand was disparate and included large amounts of complex product data. This data needed to be handled safely, presented quickly and delivered to Bloomreach for their advanced search experience.
The size and complexity of the product catalog and data required customizations in the Elastic Path solution and upscaling of their cloud architecture to support Bio-Techne’s performance and scalability goals. Additionally many of the product attributes had to have their data normalized for some key shared aspects such as availability and SKU definition.
Data ingestion needed an architecture that could accept change data at different rates and sizes. Some data changes annually, some changes weekly, while other data changes multiple times per day.
Solution
We were able to implement an Elastic Path eCommerce backend that connects to the updated Bio-Techne Drupal front end website, developed by the Bio-Techne front end team.
We worked with Bio-Techne to provide a robust site which consolidates all Bio-Techne brand products under one roof. Bounteous did that by implementing a headless eCommerce platform utilizing Elastic Path. Once developed, Bounteous worked with Bloomreach to connect the Bio-Techne search platform to help optimize growth and visibility of the new commerce site.
Bounteous, Bio-Techne and TradeCentric collaborated over multiple months to integrate the TradeCentric experience into the new one-web platform. Elastic Path provides a launch-ready TradeCentric integration that allowed us to bring the project in quickly and reliably.
Outcomes
Bio-Techne and Bounteous have formed a long term partnership to maintain and expand this new commerce platform as they go through their journey to build out their one web experience across their entire ecosystem.
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