Case study
DUTHOIT
The customer
DUTHOIT is a company specialized in the design and production of custom cardboard packaging in small and medium series. It has a design office and a factory for cutting and printing cardboard on an area of approximately 6000m².
The issue
All customer requests (both simple and complex) require processing by the design department, even if the customer is in the industry and already knows the basic principles to follow. The significant number of different orders placed by certain reseller customers, who handle sales and distribution to end customers, tends to sometimes overload the design department. However, the latter must maintain a lead time of 1 working day between receiving the customer’s request and issuing a quoted offer.
Sometimes, a significant number of exchanges are necessary to refine the positioning of the printed part on the cardboard, which greatly affects profitability for small series.
Summary of the proposed solution
Creation of an e-commerce website allowing customers to design their own custom cardboard project with 3D preview including cuts and printing, obtaining real-time cost, and the ability to place an order.
Alban C. , Manager
DUTHOIT
We initiated a highly innovative E-commerce project in March 2022 with the integration of a 3D rendering engine for fully customizable packaging, named Web2pack.
The entire WordPress and WooCommerce development, and especially the integration of the engine's APIs, was handled by the Nextaura teams. I am truly satisfied with the quality of the professional and human relationship we were able to build with the various stakeholders in France and Madagascar, with whom I enjoyed working. They were responsive and adapted to the various changes imposed by this complex project. Today, the site is online, and all specialists agree that the challenge was far from won!
I would like to add that a very comprehensive documentation was delivered with the project, which is not so common! In short, I highly recommend!
The details of the proposed solution and the approach adopted
The German software publisher CloudLab AG offers a ready-to-use solution called PrintQ, which allows managing its catalog of printing products (types of boxes, compositions, dimensions, options, etc.) directly from a management and administration interface.
However, this solution needs to be integrated into an e-commerce website to be usable by consumers. By default, the only type of e-commerce sites supported by PrintQ is Magento.
However, Magento is relatively complex to administer, maintain, and requires significant server resources, which did not make this choice suitable for the client’s context.
Building on its experience with WordPress/WooCommerce, Nextaura proposed using this platform for the project and integrating the PrintQ solution into it. The advantage being a more controlled development cost and simplified maintenance.
In addition to having completed the integration, we have also:
- Developed a WordPress module to be able to manage the data stored through the PrintQ administration interface.
- Developed a pricing engine to have a price calculated based on a relatively complex set of business rules.
- Ensured the installation and optimization of development platforms.
The payment part was based on the Monetico solution (which was integrated into WooCommerce).
The difficulties overcome
Learning about the packaging cutting and printing business and its specificities.
Exchange with the PrintQ editor to be able to produce products on the target platform (WordPress/WooCommerce).
Development of a pricing engine to provide a real-time quote directly linked to the manufacturing cost (type of cardboard, number of cuts, machines used in the process, etc.).
Our resources involved in the project
A technical-functional project manager (Scrum Master) adept at Agile practices who acted as the interface between client teams and developers and was responsible for the installation and configuration of systems in accordance with best practices, especially security
A frontend developer specialized in WordPress/WooCommerce and frontend technologies (ReactJS, VueJS)
A backend developer specialized in handling complex issues (creation of algorithms and interfaces for exchanges between different platforms)
The tools and technologies used
Zoho Sprints (simplifies project management in Agile mode)
WordPress/WooCommerce (an open, modular, and accessible e-commerce solution enabling rapid customization while benefiting from a wide range of natively integrated features or via third-party modules)
PHP-Symfony (a framework enabling the rapid development of robust and easily maintainable applications over time due to its native support for a wide range of built-in functions)
