.png?width=193&name=Logo%20(1).png)
Spartacus implementation + SAP Commerce Cloud
Scalable launches in 20 markets with a custom partner portal
Mirka Ltd is a world leader in surface finishing technology and offers a broad range of groundbreaking sanding solutions for the surface finishing and precision industry.
As a globally expanding company with 18 subsidiaries all over the world and cooperating with many partners, Mirka needed to build a solid partner portal to keep the brand consistent and to communicate with its partners
Technology
Spartacus
SAP Commerce Cloud
Vertical
Manufacturing
Mirka has 20 subsidiaries located in Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, as well as Asia. The headquarters and main production are located in Finland. More than 97% of Mirka’s products are exported and sold in more than 100 countries.
Mirka sells its products to the market through distribution resellers, official export partners, and direct-to-end customers. Having a wide range of partners, Mirka decided to invest in digital services and become a digital pioneer in the industry. This strategic investment aims to cover all of their customer groups from contract distributors to end-consumers.
Recognized objectives
Key factors in Mirka’s business transformation journey and ambition are to offer a superior omnichannel customer experience that utilizes new operative models and a modern technology platform. To achieve that, Mirka needed to create a partner portal incorporating the functionality of eCommerce.
The main objective of Mirka’s Partner Portal was to help its partners do business by providing them with information about offers and tools. In addition, Mirka's Partner Portal was also supposed to act as an administration hub. Mirka decided to choose SAP as the main technology provider, and so they were looking for an experienced partner for front-end implementation.
Picked technologies
As a core contributor to SAP Spartacus storefront since 2017 and a global leader in eCommerce-oriented progressive web apps, Divante proved to be a perfect fit for the project.
SAP Spartacus is a lean, Angular-based, fully decoupled JavaScript storefront that connects with SAP Commerce Cloud and potentially other services, like a content management system, loyalty program, etc., through the REST API.
In the meantime, Mirka found a back-end partner, which was the KPS agency. Their work was mainly concerned with integrations with different SAP products used at Mirka and also with Mirka’s proprietary ERP system. Divante worked closely with KPS on the OCC REST API side and SAP CDC integration.
Cooperation between Mirka and Divante started at the end of 2019 with a code review of the previous storefront. In April 2020, Divante began a discovery phase mostly led by KPS which was responsible for the business analysis. Just before that, Mirka prepared an extensive list of user stories to be implemented throughout the project.
Discovery and design
The discovery phase aimed to retrieve details about each user story as well as to prioritize them. The responsibility of Divante was to align these stories and priorities with available Spartacus features and the Spartacus Roadmap.
The design process started with the workshop and thorough research in May 2020, just a few weeks before the front-end development. The main expectation was to create a more intuitive and responsive design for the target groups.
Development
Front-end work included installing Spartacus, adapting it to the project requirements, and implementing B2B functionalities that were not available out of the box at the time.
We managed to successfully integrate the storefront with Episerver CMS, now Optimizely, to display the extensive content, SAP Customer Data Cloud for user authentication, profile management, and Google Tag Manager. We also implemented custom features, like a reporting system, product configurator, custom checkout flow, and many others.
Implementation
Although the project started with version 2.0 of Spartacus, it was already built with the possibility of development in mind, and its subsequent upgrade to version 3.0 and 4.2 was very easy. In September 2020, we moved on to the user acceptance testing phase which resulted in quickly locating and defining defects and making all the changes requested by the client.
