Langia IT Solutions
Taking SAP Commerce to the Next Level

The memorable mall scene from the sci-fi blockbuster Minority Report gave us a glimpse of how personalised advertising is going to look like in the future. In the scene, as Tom Cruise walks past the screen-lined store, an amiable voice greets him, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto. Welcome back to the Gap. How did those tank tops work out for you?”

The voice belonged to an AR projection of a woman that knew the exact identity of the visitor and his previous shopping experience.

For the most part, we are headed towards a digital future envisioned in this movie, where the customer’s journey is a symbiosis of physical and virtual worlds. Businesses around the globe are constantly upgrading their technological capabilities to deliver a similar immersive and engaging digital experience to their customers. And, to take us closer to this future of revolutionary customer experience, the tech giant, SAP, is incorporating new technologies, including facial recognition, machine learning, and IoT-connected tools, into its broad suite of customer relation solutions. Most notably, its SAP Commerce platform is facilitating the creation of personalised and targeted marketing campaigns that can truly connect with the customers. And, while organisations all around the world are now adopting SAP Commerce to supercharge their marketing competencies, Langia IT Solutions—SAP’s Silver partner—is helping companies utilise the full potential of SAP Commerce and driving them to the peak of success.

The Trailblazers of SAP Commerce

“Our skilled and competent developers, architects, business analysts, and quality assurance specialists are ever ready to collaborate with our clients’ SAP teams and bolster their SAP Commerce projects,” says Måns Bynke Strandqvist, CEO of Langia. The longstanding experience and up-to-date SAP certifications of Langia’s proficient consultants further make them the perfect addition to a client’s in-house development team, making it a ‘super force’ that knows the ins and outs of SAP.

Further, bolstered by an agile onboarding method, Langia enables its clients to take their SAP Commerce projects beyond the conventional bounds. The company believes in delivering personalised attention to each of its clients, which is in striking contrast to large IT consultancies that often leverage a cookie-cutter approach. Through Langia, the clients gain access to the best resources available in the industry. Whether enterprises are looking to derive complete value from their SAP Commerce platform or other SAP consultancies seeking additional resources or guidance, Langia boosts their teams by providing the necessary support through its skilled and certified SAP specialists.

Overcoming the Implementation Challenges

As an SAP partner with Recognised Expertise for SAP Commerce, the primary goal of Langia is to remove the bottlenecks that prevent organisations from realising the latent power within their SAP Commerce platforms.

Too often, customers face challenges in implementation when they don’t have proper build pipelines to deploy the platform. They struggle to recognise the subtle functionalities of SAP Commerce, and this can throw a wrench in their marketing goals. According to Strandqvist, it all boils down to three pain points: lack of test automation and test coverage, outdated infrastructure, and minimal attention to performance during development.

“Moreover, much of the development and deployment of SAP Commerce projects today is done manually, including the testing of the code,” explains Strandqvist. As a result, enterprises receive inadequate practical test coverage despite having skilled quality assurance engineers, which leads to an incomplete assessment of business-critical scenarios. “To rectify this drawback, we offer test automation for their SAP Commerce projects,” he says. This includes unit integration and UI-driven tests. Although the shift from a manual setting can take some time, test automation pays off in the long run with increased quality, lesser bugs, and more frequent releases.

Paving the Path to the Future of Commerce

Strandqvist is also of the belief that test automation is only the first step of a business’s stairway to success. Unless enterprises update their outdated infrastructure, they are likely to face continued operational bottlenecks. Especially for companies running on on-premise servers, adding nodes to the cluster can be a lengthy process that involves server provisioning and financial drawbacks. However, with Langia’s in-depth SAP Commerce knowledge and expertise, enterprises can avert these roadblocks by moving their SAP projects to a more robust cloud infrastructure—SAP Commerce Cloud. Through this, SAP aims to unlock true digital agility by adopting new touchpoints quickly and launching new digital experiences with headless e-commerce capabilities. However, for clients seeking to remain in complete control of their operations, Langia offers a seamless cloud integration with Amazon Web Services to host their SAP Commerce projects, while also providing them with auto-scaling and quick provisioning options.

Together with revamping outdated infrastructure, ensuring the continued performance of their SAP projects is also crucial for businesses. Strandqvist mentions that the lack of performance upgrades can contribute to sluggishness in clients’ ecommerce sites. On the front-end, for instance, many projects suffer from slow-loading product pages or even something as simple as a slow add-to-cart response because of customised business logic that has been built step by step and hasn’t been adequately maintained. On the other hand, the back-end operations often have more severe performance bottlenecks, including indexing or importing product data. Although clients use SAP Commerce together with Apache Solr for site indexing, the lack of maintenance can lead to performance dips. To fix this problem, Langia offers its team of skilled developers who work their technical ‘magic’ to quickly identify the root cause of performance drops and ensure that the entire project site is running smoothly on an internal as well external level.

Sailing Through the Headwinds of the Pandemic

Among all other technological setbacks, businesses today are slacking their innovation and reinvention ‘thrusters’ during the pandemic crisis. The current volatility is making organisations ration their resources according to their most pressing needs. But they are quickly realising the importance of ecommerce channels during the COVID-19 situation. However, the shift from physical to digital channels can lead to a sudden increase in site traffic, and consequently, higher load on sites. Against this backdrop, Langia is emerging as a boon for organisations. The operational efficiency ensured by Langia through its SAP Commerce-based solutions is proving extremely crucial in today’s testing times when customers demand greater flexibility and ease of use.

“We are working together with our customers, aligning our approach with their culture, and deploying the best experts for their SAP projects”

“But knowing the demand is of no use if one cannot deliver in a timely manner,” explains Strandqvist. For this reason, the specialists at Langia are helping clients achieve the versatility they need by integrating their SAP Commerce projects with a plethora of robust solutions, including Adobe Experience Manager for content and Salesforce for customer relations. Langia’s experts are also well versed in writing code for microservices as a middle layer between different solutions. This flexibility is making it extremely easy for clients to swap core SAP components with other solutions of their choice. Thus, with Langia, clients don’t feel locked into specific solutions and are free to flex their IT independence.

To illustrate Langia’s partnership with its clients, Strandqvist presents an instance when the company worked with a premium B2B brand in the construction industry. Langia’s experts started by cleaning up the project test data and creating a smooth, standardised setup for the developers. Next, Langia introduced several layers of automated testing and developer feedback loops. The hosting of the ecommerce solution was moved from on-premise to the cloud. The accurate test data, combined with robust infrastructure, enabled the client to shift from every second-month release to every second-week release. The client witnessed a significant increase in online customer activity. The critical business scenario of adding products to the cart, proceeding to checkout, and placing an order was optimised 100 percent. As a result of these efforts, the client site was able to handle 3x orders daily and accelerate their overall growth.

Paving the Path to Future-Ready SAP Implementations

On its journey of progress, Langia is always ready to empower its clients to enhance their IT infrastructure, not only in terms of SAP Commerce but also other technologies like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Salesforce. The company is also working on the utilisation of GraphQL, which offers a robust way of dealing with various interfaces. Originally developed by Facebook for different use cases, Langia plans on helping its clients take advantage of this solution in their SAP Commerce projects. “We are working together with our customers, aligning our approach with their culture, and deploying the best experts for their SAP projects,” concludes Strandqvist.