The PENLINE Mon Ami group of companies was looking to replace their problematic e-commerce portal with a centralised and robust solution that could be integrated with their ERP system. Protogen Technologiesn delivered brand renewal, a new enterprise content management system as well as a fully customised e-commerce solution that supported their complex product offerings integrated into one single back end management system.

The Challenge

 Penline had four major websites that were hosted on 3 different ISPs, with four different content management systems which created complexity in managing the various websites.

Due to increased competition in the online promotional space, Penline was in need of a more streamlined method of handling their customers from a traditional brick and mortar to a web focused approach.

Their B2B / B2C major brands PensDirect and Global Catalogue website were also running two different eCommerce components with no way of managing any of the photos, product content and prices themselves. They relied on 3rd party web developers to maintain any changes to the sites which became very costly.

The Requirements

PENLINE approached Innovation Foundry with a vision and requirements to develop a new enterprise content management system (CMS) with tight integration to their internal ERP system from the ground up.

In addition, Penline also wanted a brand new look and feel to all four websites to create a more modern and visually appealing site. The objective was for it to be housed under a single CMS system with multiple portals for ease of management and to have total control of all content and products.

Innovation Foundry sat down with key staff members to fill out a detailed requirements specification document. Once the interviewing was completed Innovation Foundry began the basic wire framing layouts aken from the feedback and collated requirements from the interviews.

The Innovation Foundry design department team created two UI wire framing prototype versions as a base layout. We then began filling the wire frames with images and content to simulate the user page flow.

The Solution

Innovation Foundry then prepared the CMS deployment in our Tier 1 data centre in parallel with the CMS development and testing environments.

The team had been provided instructor led hands on training and were provided access to the development environment and then handover to production was performed.

During this period the company had seen an overwhelming positive response with over 1,000 of their current distributors. The key staff members had also been extremely happy with how the final systems were working and integrated into their main business workflow. The results displayed an increase in sales, customer satisfaction and Penline are now the market leaders in wholesale stationery and office supplies.