PIB SALES

SITE REDESIGN AND ERP INTEGRATION WORK FOR A GLOBAL BEARING DISTRIBUTOR

Client

Pacific International Bearing (PIB) is a global bearing distributor and an eCommerce marketplace specifically designed for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). As a leader in the bearing industry for nearly 50 years, the business works with and supplies various industries, such as robotics, high-tech, LiDar, medical equipment, machine tool, food processing, and agricultural bearings.

Challenge

Having been in the industry for almost half a century, PIB’s long-standing success has been attributed to their strong client relationships, product quality, value, and overall ability to adapt to the ever-changing business landscape with new technology.

PIB came to us with a problem that their internal team wasn’t able to solve. They had created a legacy site but it was in serious need of an update in order to aid their growth and lower the need for customer service support. They knew they wanted to scale with new visitors and suppliers, but weren’t sure how to do it effectively. PIB also had a number of 3rd party systems they relied on and changing requirements behind the scenes, which required a competent software development team who could connect new suppliers to their business, as well as synchronize several existing services and technologies under one site.

Strategy

After running an in-depth analysis of the PIB ecosystem, market, and competitors, our developers devised a three-step plan to achieve the project aims:

1. The synchronization of an internal ordering system (ERP) with a third-party vendor and PIB’s site.

2. A migration of all existing customer order history and data.

3. A microservice as an intermediate link to exchange data between the customer's application and the main site to speed up the site and avoid the product list slowing the entire process.

Having defined the plan, we started with the designs by collecting creative requirements from the client and eventually approving the new designs with qualitative feedback.

eCommerce Marketplace Redesign & Development

/ PIB Sales

Solutions

Technologies

Figma, Miro, WordPress,
Laravel, PHP, MySQL, JS/jQuery,
Bootstrap, CSS, HTML, Rest API,
Webpack, SASS, NGINX

WordPress was used as the CMS since it was familiar to the customer and is a common system with an intuitive interface.

Laravel for the micro-service. It is a flexible framework for microservice development, helping us create an intermediate link between the main site and the client's application.

WooCommerce was used for order processing, the eCommerce functionality available on WordPress.

Results

After a few months of work, PIB’s site, tech stack, and accompanying integrations had been upgraded as outlined at the beginning of the project.

Our software experts had updated the site design, as well as added additional fields (description, picture, and attributes) to the synchronization of products - which was originally only synchronized by name.

We had created an additional service on Laravel for processing large amounts of data and also implemented a Paytrace payment system. This payment system included an automatic recall and memorization of non-protected and non-sensitive payment details.

Review

“During the discovery process, we discovered there was a much larger product list than anticipated. Having such a large list threatened to negatively impact the site speed. As a result, we choose to build a microservice on Laravel to bridge the gap between the product data and the live site, which kept the site lean and quick for a smooth user experience.“