Lux Group Handles Transaction Data With Smart Integration
Business is growing for Lux Group, an Australian pure-play e-commerce business offering single-category shopping, including experiences such as dining and entertainment, designer fashion and home goods, and luxury global travel packages. However, growing from two to 15 online brands in its first five years of operation caused the firm to outgrow its accounting and ERP operations software provider. Intent on effectively managing transactions with its nearly 7,000 vendors, Lux Group wanted to create a workflow capable of handling the entire vendor relationship lifecycle, from procurement to payment.
“We had effective startup systems, but quickly hit capacity from both a functional and operational perspective," said Brett Raven, Lux Group’s chief technology officer. "This was based on growth fueled organically as well as through acquisitions. That need drove consideration of new architectures, and how the company would move data between the monolithic systems powering its core business and its new ERP system. The firm focused on establishing a growth infrastructure through an enterprise service bus (ESB) design, creating a manageable, long-term way to transform rough, unstructured data from its legacy-built application and push it into NetSuite for smooth vendor operations."
Lux Group deployed Neuron ESB, a robust ESB optimized for the Microsoft .NET platform, as a means to transform a constant influx of unstructured data to NetSuite’s SOA message format.
“It was important to avoid complex user interfaces or more extreme coding requirements,” Raven said.
Lux Group decided its legacy system wouldn't push data to the ESB platform, but rather data would instead be pulled as a means of enabling control and visibility as deployment unfolded. The ESB platform triggers orchestration and events, using an integrated NetSuite connector to synchronize vendor, purchase order, product and payment transactions.
“We’re moving a significant number of transactions, which you can really see when you pull the data apart," said Raven. "It’s about 20,000 transactions daily, each containing multiple items for every website in our portfolio.”
Lux Group’s development teams have been structured to collaborate. Visibility into various feature sets and layers of work is enabled by working with the ESB platform in parallel and using the same stack for multiple teams. Transactions feature vendor-related financial data and operations such as purchase orders, vendor bills and "recipient-created tax invoices," or invoices for materials Lux Group consumes on a supplier basis.
“It’s running very smoothly because all our websites aggregate to the back end, with one platform for all vendor data,” said Raven.
Lux Group also now has visibility into throughput and health checks on its endpoints, and can manage or replay messages if they fail. The firm is recognizing much greater speed in how data is transformed and pushed into NetSuite ERP, and is poised for continued growth with additional websites.
Marty Wasznicky is Neuron ESB’s vice president, and spearheads product innovation, solving customers’ data integration challenges with hands-on application engineering insight.
