DXP
eCommerce for Big Industries
With a disruptive solution, DXP can provide innovative pumping solutions for the gas and oil industry with a massive e-commerce with over four million items.
Mission
With deep roots in the oil and gas industry, DXP is a Houston-based enterprise that, within its scope, provides pumps and industrial supplies and has a solid presence across US cities and states.
Impact
DXP rises as a publicly traded company with national recognition in professional distribution management. It provides services across industries with its innovative Pumping Solutions (IPS), Supply Chain Services, and MROP Products and Services.
Services
The provided services enclosed both an e-commerce platform to stay ahead of the curve, an app for their clients to enhance request rates, and a complex ERP to maintain an optimal business flow.
Goal
Since it has a history of over 100 years serving the gas and oil industry, the goal was to adapt to a tech-driven landscape to provide updated solutions for its customers.
Story
DXPe was born as Southern Engine and Pump Company in 1908, re-chartered Sepco Industries in 1979, and renamed DXP Enterprises, Inc. in 1996. With a focus on customer-supporting abilities, the company was able to acquire diverse companies, harnessing their product expertise and technical services.
To this day, DXP remains on the leading edge of technology, training, and products, with a distinct specialization in Industrial MRO supply chain management that allows it to attract and retain high-level employees for long-term partnerships. The core of their strategy relies on being the industrial customer’s best choice.
Challenges
For Capicua’s team, the challenges were divided into three main areas: maintaining business rules, developing a transparent process, and improving Client Experience.
First, its ERP software didn’t have a structure that made the connection with its e-commerce possible, and its e-commerce platform didn’t have an API to interact with its ERP. All these disconnections made redesign a highly complex challenge.
While its previous e-commerce provider was outdated and unintuitive for regular users, the company didn’t want to migrate its core business flow from its current provider, so a simple e-commerce solution was not enough for its offering.
The challenge was to improve their technology and apply a user-focused approach to build a custom warehouse solution that allowed DPX to keep growing.
Worth Mentioning
Since DXP offers over four million different items, the warehouse design needed to contemplate every detail. Nowadays, with our custom solution, A-list companies like Shell can buy from a single screw to 10 million dollar oil pumps.
Technology
The e-commerce core platform was B2BCommerce, with the ASP.NET Web API on Microsoft Azure. We also combined SQLServer 2012 as the e-commerce database with SQLServer as the Web API database. Lastly, we further harnessed JQUERY and ASP.NET for the custom code layer and Swift for the iOS app development.
Since B2BCommerce doesn’t have content management functions, we created content configuration files that store customer-specific info by building an API that runs on Azure to provide information to the mobile app. The API communicates with our custom code layer to retrieve and send data to B2BCommerce.
Design
In design terms, our UI/UX Design team defined the look and feel of both its new site and its e-commerce platform, with a special focus on user experience. To achieve this, we developed and designed the iOS app interface to enhance the purchase experience, including browsing products, creating purchase lists, and scanning desired items’ barcodes.
We further made our code layer to connect B2BCommerce with our custom front-end and mobile app. As a result, customers can easily find products in DXP’s enormous stock within the app.
