Embracing eCommerce demands with Speed, Agility & Resilience

Recent years have seen eCommerce demands accelerate rapidly. Impacted by the onset of the pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns, long-standing InterSystems partner, M-Tech, needed to support customers requiring a rapid scaling of their ability to adapt to changing customer behaviour, overcoming supply chain shortages, and navigating the uncertain landscape.

M-Tech’s ERP software application AMO, underpinned by the InterSystems IRIS data platform, powers the growth of online retail businesses offering capability for stock-buying to warehouse pick, pack and dispatch transactions, sales order processing, EPOS, content management, marketing data capture, along with full accounting functionality that includes purchase and sales ledger.

During the highest peak of demands, AMO customers were able to analyse patterns in data that identified the most effective options to split and pick orders economically to alleviate backlogs during supply chain disruption, with dashboards that displayed different scenarios and their predicted outcomes. Based on this insight, product could be reallocated from orders that could not be shipped to one set of their customers, enabling improved delivery for others.

When the pandemic hit, an M-Tech customer already utilizing AMO in the mobility sector was able to react fast and adapt their whole business model with ease and confidence. 27 physical stores across the UK closed, losing the customer interaction and positive experience for which they were renowned. To ensure business continuity and growth, M-Tech supported their business in boosting its web capabilities, adding functionality such as a new customer services bot and the ability to set up video appointments to showcase products live to customers to ensure maintain a highly engaging customer experience.

The results were a 25% increase in online orders and resiliency for returning back to the in-store sales model, which resulted in a 5% increase in revenue.

In the pharmaceutical sector, with GP surgeries and high street pharmacies closed, demand for online prescriptions and medications were at an all-time never seen before peak. AMO allowed customers in this space to significantly scale to fulfil a 100% increase in demand without any downtime or interruption to the users’ experience, despite the unprecedented levels of data required.

In the retail eCommerce sector, with lockdown keeping customers at home, the gardening sector experienced unprecedented demand coupled with a global supply chain falling to its knees. Being able to gain real-time, intelligent actionable insight to forecast demand and stock inventory, to optimise fulfilment, and importantly to ensure customers receive a positive experience, even with disruption, allowed one M-Tech customer to achieve a 50% increase in sales – all using existing technology capabilities that scaled to demand without reducing performance.

This resiliency and agility was achieved by fully adopting the underlying performance, speed, and adaptability of InterSystems IRIS data platform.

Paul Martin, Operations Director, M-Tech said: “Scalability has been one of the predominate factors in us ensuring our customers’ success and growth, even when their fundamental business models had to change overnight. InterSystems IRIS enabled our customers to cope with the high peaks in demand while their competitors struggled. InterSystems IRIS underpins our application, providing the speed and scalability required to excel in very demanding circumstances.”

InterSystems dependable technology and 24/7 support have allowed M-Tech to pursue its own growth strategy, supplying the highest quality of service to accelerate customers’ expansion.

“Our daily focus is always on the customer,” explained Paul. “We help them take advantage of the software to advance and grow – an approach which came to the fore during the difficulties of the pandemic and something that InterSystems technology enables us to do.”

As M-Tech expands, it now looks to fully harness the InterSystems flexible deployment options – moving its customer base to the cloud securely and with ease. It is also expanding its use of the embedded analytics capabilities InterSystems IRIS provides to enable customers to embed business intelligence (BI) which is prebuilt into the data platform with no requirements for additional software or infrastructure changes.

The triumphs of M-Tech and its AMO customers during and after the pandemic are examples of how InterSystems supports organisations in gaining better, real-time access to their data to See, Understand, Optimise, and Act when it comes to their supply chain challenges, even under extreme pressure. Many businesses currently lack accurate, end-to-end visibility, reporting, and actionable insights, and many have disjointed data from which it's difficult to gain insight to improve time-to-decision.

In highly uncertain times, organisations find it hard to conduct analytics and suffer from lack of access to predictive or prescriptive recommendations and options. Many experience long delays in accessing their own data and must use manual processes that are time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies.

This shortfall in capabilities is a significant drawback for many businesses in the aftermath of the pandemic, when inflation, war, and trade tensions have intensified the challenges, placing a high premium on the ability to manage volatility and risk through greater visibility and supply chain agility. Sudden demand for new or different products can lead to unfulfilled orders. Organisations must adapt to improve execution and implement digital transformation to obtain higher levels of performance.

InterSystems IRIS data platform resolves these challenges because it is a complete, cloud-first platform that makes it easier to build high-performance, machine learning-enabled applications that connect data and application silos. It provides database management, interoperability, and analytics capabilities, all built-in from the ground up, to speed and simplify the most demanding data-intensive applications.