DOUGLAS LABORATORIES
Who is Douglas Laboratories?
Douglas Laboratories® is one of the leading brands in the research, development and manufacture of food supplements. The company was founded in Pittsburgh in 1955. Since 2005, the Douglas Laboratories® brand is part of the Atrium Innovations Inc. group – a world leader in the development, manufacture and marketing of food supplements. It currently owns and distributes 13 of the specialized brands most valued by professionals. It is operating in more than 50 countries, with more than 1,400 employees and 7 factories around the world.
The food supplements of the brand are scientifically backed and manufactured with the highest quality standards. The products of Douglas Laboratories® are designed to provide health professionals with the goods for caring for their patients.
Why has Magento been used?
Douglas Laboratories® had previously worked with Magento, but wanted to renew their online business, expand and customize some features. Choosing an Open Source e-commerce tool, first we have analysed the needs and expectations of the client. We have also taken in mind the volume of business. Magento uses the MySQL/MariaDB relational database system, the PHP programming language, and Zend Framework elements. It also applies the practices of object-oriented programming and the model-view-controller architecture. In the same way it uses the entity-attribute-value model to store the data. For its project Douglas Laboratories® has chosen a company of experts in Magento with many years of experience in ecommerce.
What work have we done?
Design and layout
The company had a web design done previously using very defined graphic line. In this way, our designers for Magento have created a design very similar to their previous website: clean and responsive, similar to others international sites of the company. Following with the layout work, it also was done by our Gsoft programmers. In this manner, all the design work has been done in our office.
Programming, installation and configuration of the server
Likewise, the programming work of the online store has been done by our programmers. They have been responsible for the installation, configuration of the store and the programming of the new functionalities necessary to carry out the project. The web site has become a portal for professionals, with access to documentation and exclusive product information.
Synchronization
Previously the client already had an infrastructure based on the ERP Exact Globe. That is why its ERP and the Magento online store has been synchronizated. In this way the customer does not need to enter Magento for daily work with products, customers, orders and prices, everything is automatically synchronized between the two systems. For example, when a product or customer is created/modified in the customer’s ERP, it is automatically appears in the Magento store. In the same way, when an order is placed in the store, it is recorded in the customer’s system and is already processed outside of Magento. It is only necessary to use Magento to fill in complementary product information and take care of front-end aspects such as sliders or static pages.
Customer training
Finally, there has been a training for the management of Magento. Training sessions have been held at the Valencia offices of Douglas Laboratories®, that its marketing team does not need our services to perform daily tasks:
- Management of static pages.
- Configuration of dynamic banners and sliders.
- Updating data and images of products and categories.
