Tons of Toner
A time crunch to migrate from an unsupported legacy platform
Tons of Toner is a company that fulfills rare and highly sought after toner and related components for business machines, in all industries, including education, government, and enterprise. When they were faced with a tough decision to get off of an existing legacy platform they were vendor locked to, in a very short space of time, we gladly accepted the challenge.
Requirements
Tons of Toners existing site was built during the early dot-com boom and the technologies had changed greatly. We needed to get off of that platform, migrate over a decades worth of orders, customers and products, including supplier and vendor synchronization, purchase orders capabilities, cataloging and referencing. The requirements came in the form of a very long list. Read on to see what we were tasked with accomplishing.
We needed to be able to migrate up to a decade's worth of customers, orders, products, machine, content, images, and make sure that data matched the requirements of the new system.
We needed to keep supplier stocks in check, pulling data from multiple vendors in different formats and making sure all the data matched up correctly, to provide an accurate cross-reference.
We needed to make sure that purchase orders could be made from orders based upon supplier, stock levels, location and more.
Products needed to relate to multiple different machines, and those machines needed to be expressed in order to allow customers to accurately find the product they needed, including compatibles.
Tons of Toner needed to be able to accurately search and surgically inspect their orders to detect fraud, irregularities and help their customers get what they need. They also needed to be able to report on sale data and customer behavior.
Tons of Toner needed to make sure that the correct supplies could be found, because of this they needed supplier and also their aliases to be searchable, including those reference inside multiple machines.
How we did it
Full Migration
We migrated 28000+ machines, 12000+ products, tens of thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of orders, using a Drupal migration, piecing data from their original provided SQL tables and transposing it to the new data structure. We also had to relate orders to existing customers, map products and aliases to machines and set up the relationships, it was a lot of work, but we made it in great time.
Supplier Management
Tons of Toner has a complex supply chain and needed to keep updated records on supplier pricing, availability, location and more. They also needed to keep records of matches in their own inventory also, to make sure they could get their customers what they need.
We implemented a customer supplier manager, to fetch updated records, transpose them and to provide cross-referencing with existing products.
Purchase Orders
At times, Tons of Toner needed to create purchase order's to send to their suppliers. They wanted the ability to do this directly from an order, with the option to select and add suppliers and see a fully rendered template of how the purchase order would be sent out.
Product Architecture
Tons of Toners product layout needs to be very specific to the industry, this means that products are attached to one or more machines, and the part numbers can contain aliases. Also, some products can be compatibles, meaning the products are produced by an alternate manufacturer to the machine manufacturer.
We solved this my creating a custom machine entity type, that would house references to these products and maintain the complex relationships. By using Apache Solr we were able to greatly speed up the display and searching capabilities.
Search
We configured a powerful search that would allow for part number, alias and compatibles searching, using Search API. This would also enable highlighting and robust filtering using the Drupal Facet API.
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What People Say About Us
Items were always delivered on time, often exceeding expectations. When discussing items, valuable advice was given on how to improve them to save costs and time in the future. The response was almost always immediate, no matter what time of day it was.
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