This article explains how an eCommerce or Lockbox implementation project works.
Before purchasing our software, it is important to discuss which 3rd party systems you intend to integrate with. You may be integrating with banks, Shopping Carts, credit card processors, customers, vendors, eBay, Amazon, EDI, etc. Many of these partners offer different integration options such as API, csv, xml, txt, email, ftp, etc. If your partner uses a file of some sort, send us the file as soon as possible so we can take a look. You should also consider the role you wish to play in your eCommerce/Lockbox project(s). Some of our customers handle their implementations entirely by themselves (after we train them). Other customers prefer to let us handle everything. Some fall into the middle, preferring to handle some of the lighter technical tasks themselves, and having us deal with some of the more complicated matters. Consider the role you wish to play in implementing your new software.
The sequence of events listed below will happen immediately after completing your purchase of Pulse Lockbox or Pulse eCommerce software. We bundle six hours of implementation services with your purchase to setup your first mapping/partner. So, everything listed below should only take about six hours or less.
Kickoff Email
- Your license key.
- A link to download the software.
- Mapping settings if applicable. Most likely we already have an integration mapping for your partner, or we can quickly set one up. In this case, we will send you the settings needed to connect to your partner before we even have our first implementation meeting.
First Implementation Meeting
- For this meeting, we need an IT person or someone who knows how to access your SQL server.
- We install the software. We recommend it be installed in some shared folder on your network. Then we just place shortcuts on the desktops of the users that need to use it.
- We create a very small “Pulse” database on your SQL server. This database contains thousands of specific settings that allows our software to work with your various partners, in the exact way you specify. We purposely keep this information separate from Macola because you will most likely have multiple Macola databases. These could be multiple companies, or at least a test/live version of your one company.
- We connect to your Macola databases. We normally like to start with a test company. This gives us the freedom to push lots of test transactions into Macola.
- We import your mapping settings that were made ahead of time, or we can make one with you on-the-fly during this meeting.
- The mapping that we start with will probably not have any fancy logic in it that pertains only to your business (at first). The idea here is that you need to see transactions going into Macola from your partners as quickly as possible.
- Now that you can see transactions flowing into Macola, we can make all sorts of changes that are specific to your business. You may want to alter how ship via codes are determined, or maybe you have user defined fields that need to be populated a certain way. Whatever you need, most of these things are very easy to change so we try to take care of most of them during this first meeting.
- After making all those little changes, we push the transactions into Macola again. We keep repeating this process until you feel everything is correct.
- Everything covered in this meeting serves as technical training for your personal that may be making changes to our software in the future. Depending upon your interest, at this point in the meeting we could dive deeper into more advanced technical topics.
- We can conduct end user training or you may prefer to handle this internally.
Review Transactions
Have the end users review the transactions we pushed into Macola (orders, cash receipts, etc.). Only your end users will know about all the little Macola details that we need to be concerned with. If there are any problems, they will find them. Have your end-users run the transactions through every single process they normally would with real transactions.
Make Needed Changes
During our next meeting, we can make changes to your software to accommodate any problems the end users discover. We can have as many of these follow-up meetings as necessary to make everything perfect, or you may have decided to make these changes on your own. Most of our customers choose to have a couple of follow-up meetings. Each meeting lasts about an hour. These follow-up meetings consume the majority of your implementation hours. How many hours/meetings will you need? This depends upon how many changes you need to make, but most of our customers don’t need more than 6 hours of Leahy Consulting time to go live.
Go Live
Additional Help
Most of our customers set up additional mappings or partners in the future. Leahy Consulting can help you with this, or you can choose to handle it on your own. If you get stuck, we can help you.