With over 145 years of experience in the printing industry, dedicated manufacturing facilities located on every continent, and represented in over 100 countries worldwide, Agfa Graphics is a world leader in prepress and digital printing solutions.

Agfa Graphics strives to be the number one supplier of integrated pre-media solutions for commercial and newspaper printing. They have designed a number of products in their :Apogee Suite to aid commercial printers with collaboration, pre-press solutions, and color management. One of the three main components within the suite is :Apogee Portal, designed to strengthen the communication and collaboration between commercial printers and their customers.

Business Goals

Like many industries today, print has evolved. Giving consumers the ability to order online is becoming critical to the commercial printing business. Today's printers are moving beyond strictly print products by broadening their offerings and becoming print and marketing service providers. As a key part of their B2B2C business, Agfa Graphics wanted to empower commercial printers by extending :Apogee Portal with :Apogee StoreFront, a web-based commerce solution that would allow print service providers to create their own multiple unique storefronts, each targeted at specific clients.

:Apogee StoreFront would target graphic designers, marketing managers, creative directors, small business owners, and franchisees. It was important that the system not only include print-specific features, but also an intuitive design which would allow non-technical customers to easily setup and manage their own public storefronts, product offerings, orders, and internal approval cycles.

To maintain their position as a leader within the printing industry, Agfa aspired to launch :Apogee StoreFront at drupa 2012, the world's largest and most important print and media trade fair.

Ecommerce Solution

To bring :Apogee StoreFront to life, Agfa Graphics searched for a robust, highly scalable ecommerce platform with multiple store management functionality, and support for multiple currencies and languages. With a strong background in Java, they also sought out a technology stack that would integrate easily with the IT environment of their existing :Apogee Suite.

Key Features and Integrations:

HTML5-based StoreCenter to enable store setup and order tracking

Multiple Store Management to allow print service providers to create multiple targeted storefronts

Support for multiple languages and currencies essential for international corporations

Integrated Online Editor which allows print service providers to offer their customers an innovative way of creating personalized products

Integrated with :Apogee Prepress 8 workflow, which automatically downloads orders from the storefront and processes them

Integrated with a range of Payment Gateway Services which allow online customers to pay using a wide range of credit or debit cards

Software-as-a-Service hosted cloud deployment, to reduce initial investment and time-to-market

Deployment

Built on a foundation of the industry's best open source technologies and open standards, the Java-based technology stack of the Elastic Path? Commerce Engine was a strong technical fit for the existing :Apogee environment. Despite the highly customized nature of this project, the flexible platform coupled with comprehensive training and thorough documentation allowed the :Apogee StoreFront team to efficiently deploy a white-label, cloud-based SaaS, web-to-print ecommerce solution in approximately 18 months, using their own in-house resources.

By leveraging the multichannel capabilities of the Elastic Path software, the :Apogee StoreFront team built a custom web application layer on top of the Elastic Path Commerce Engine. This HTML5 administration tool permits individual printers to manage multiple storefronts using an intuitive, user-friendly interface. To support their international client base, this application has also been localized to support twelve different languages; seamlessly translating all UI-related elements and backend components.

:Apogee StoreFront has been integrated with other Agfa Graphics systems, including :Apogee Prepress. :Apogee Prepress 8 is a print production system which downloads orders from the :Apogee StoreFront system and automatically processes them on location. It can group multiple orders on a press sheet to lower the production cost and speed up delivery.

Results

:Apogee StoreFront was successfully launched, as planned, at the drupa 2012 show. Since the first launch they have deployed throughout Europe and the United States, and plan to continue expanding into Australia, South America, and Asia in the near future. They currently have customers in 12 countries that are using the Elastic Path Commerce Engine as the foundation for their ecommerce activities.

The Elastic Path Commerce Engine has allowed rapid innovation for the :Apogee StoreFront team, enabling them to release new versions on a significantly shorter development cycle. The industry's best technology stack, and the unparalleled flexibility of the Elastic Path Commerce Engine, was everything that Agfa Graphics needed to make this project a success.