LCI

LCI is an NIB-affiliated, not-for-profit corporation providing products and services to the US Government. Operating under the auspices of the AbilityOne program, LCI has grown and diversified for over 80 years to become one of the largest employers of people who are blind or visually impaired in the United States.

LCI operates multiple distribution centers, e-commerce websites, retail stores, and manufacturing facilities within the United States. Through their three eCommerce websites they sell office supplies, office equipment, furniture, industrial supplies, and tactical assault gear to government and military buyers.

Prior to their move to Magento Commerce, LCI operated their eCommerce sites on a custom-built ASP/.Net solution with an integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX. LCI selected Magento Commerce for their new eCommerce platform because of its robust eCommerce feature set, ability to easily extend to meet their custom needs, B2B capabilities for supporting multiple corporate and government buying groups and pricing plans, and the ability to operate multiple eCommerce sites under a single platform.

The objectives of the project included the following:

• Move all LCI eCommerce sites from a custom ASP/.Net implementation to Magento Commerce with an integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX.
• Upgrade of the Microsoft Dynamics AX system.
• Allow B2B customers to see all their orders online.
• Streamline the administration of multiple websites.

LCI, Kadro Solutions, and LCI’s integration partner for Microsoft Dynamics worked together to achieve the objectives of the project. The risks and challenges to the project was significant considering that both the eCommerce system and the supporting ERP system were being changed in tandem.

Three sites on Magento Commerce launched June 2018:

• www.buylci.com
• www.lcidistribution.com
• www.tacticalassaultgearstore.com

Key features and capabilities migrated and developed within Magento Commerce for LCI include the following:

• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX for all product feeds, category feeds, inventory, pricing, orders, shipping, and fulfillment. This includes products and categories sourced by a third-party distributor and fulfillment partners.
• LCI’s existing branding and graphical design was to be maintained for the new site. Kadro utilized Magento’s built-in mobile responsive web theme, Luma, to ensure the site leveraged all built-in Magento templates and achieved branding and graphic design consistency with the existing sites.
• Cancels, Returns, and Exchanges are handled within Microsoft Dynamics AX and required integration with Magento Commerce for importing return orders.
• Tiered table-based shipping rates and carrier-based shipping rates, depending on specific business rules, were required for the Magento Commerce site.
• Specific business rules for 2-tier and 3-tier purchase order flow must be applied to Magento Commerce’s B2B workflow process.
• Some products are only available to purchase by specific customer groups. A single category will contain restricted and unrestricted products.
• Customers on a subset of the websites purchase via a contractual price book. Therefore, the rules Magento uses to give customers the lowest price had to be overwritten to support specific pricing by customer group.
• Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce pricing engine supported real time lookup of three tier pricing tier (base + price book + contract pricing) which needed to be converted to the two-tier model supported by Magento (base + customer group).
• EDI orders and phone assisted orders processed through Microsoft Dynamics AX are fed to Magento Commerce so that customers can have a complete omni-channel experience for reviewing order status and invoice history.
• Magento Commerce’s multi-site support enables LCI to operate and manage all three eCommerce sites under one administrative control and hosting environment.

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