Spryker MVP B2B Shop for an international pioneer

With a new B2B service portal, the Pfeifer Group is further expanding its pioneering role in Europe's wood industry in the area of "Technology Ownership".

Since the first quarter of 2020, customers have been able to obtain detailed information about Pfeifer products in a protected area, order online and track the entire order process in real time.

Joint challenge

As a company in the "wood" resource trade, it is difficult to differentiate ourselves from other companies purely on the basis of the raw material. The vision of the digitalization strategy was therefore to translate analogue competitive advantages into the digital space.

In the concept phase, an initial range of functions for the minimum viable product was defined on the basis of user interviews and an examination of internal processes. The aim was to radically simplify external ordering processes and thus enable buyers to procure wood products quickly. The agile SCRUM approach enables our project team to incorporate ongoing feedback from the market - from user interviews and user testing - into the development process.

With Spryker, we can implement company-specific ordering processes, price calculations or logistics coordination quickly and easily.

Thanks to more than 300 available modules, Spryker can be used to supplement existing core systems. The concept behind the Symfony-based framework helps us to implement user-defined requirements in a targeted manner with inheritance and override mechanisms.

However, for applications of this size and complexity, automated quality assurance measures should ideally be built in to avoid fatal errors.

With Spryker, testing coverage and error susceptibility are kept as low as possible. This is possible with the help of various approaches, ranging from framework tooling (code sniffers, complexity analyzers, etc.) to automated tests.

No project is error-free. That's why we proactively address errors, including with monitoring tools from New Relic, which we use to monitor various aspects of the application and log errors in the live system,

Docker SDK

A particular highlight is the recently available Docker SDK, which specializes in Spryker projects. Well thought-out and ideal for setting up the development environment and infrastructure that we need for Spryker.

And the effort has paid off: in the end, we have created an infrastructure that is not only scalable, secure, performant and efficiently rebuildable, but is also much more fail-safe than the usual systems on the market.

The most important learning: the basic infrastructure in projects of this type must be taken into account from the outset and should not be underestimated. We are happy that, together with Spryker & our hosting partner, we were able to overcome all the problems and ultimately create an application that not only makes us proud, but also our customer.

Customer feedback

"Our B2B service portal combines the analog world of the wood industry with digital innovation. This simplicity in online access for customers will also become a competitive factor in the B2B sector in the future."

Michael Pfeifer, CEO of Pfeifer Holding