IDEX Health & Science
Magento, Customized for B2B
IDEX Health & Science is the world’s leading provider of fluidic systems and components. Dominantly an OEM company, IDEX provides components to a myriad of fluidic devices, from crucial medical devices to school cafeteria juice dispensers. IDEX’s website represents the company’s digital presence online, and as a B2B website, it was important to the IDEX team that they created a seamless eCommerce experience for their clients.
We were first introduced to IDEX by their design firm, who had been working with them for over 25 years. When IDEX needed development and project management assistance from a firm with Magento® expertise, their firm recommended us.
IDEX’s previous developers had been available on a needs-basis, which meant that there was often a weeks-long waiting period before observed website issues were fixed. When we sat down with IDEX, they made it clear that they needed developers capable of jumping into a backlog of issues they needed addressed. Carefully planning out their work into 2-week sprints, we were able to create a plan of consistent, ongoing website updates for the IDEX website.
Better Website Performance With a Strategy For Integrity
We were first engaged in 2016 for a series of maintenance and update sprints on IDEX’s completed Magento website. On a monthly sprint basis, we have been working to clear IDEX’s backlog of reported issues and initiate a website performance tuning sprint. Working together with both the IDEX marketing and IT departments, we introduced new features to their website and improved site performance, enabling their website to load faster. We also modified several integrations with JD Edwards–their ERP tool–and provided general technical support for their B2B commerce operations.
Combining Content and Commerce
In 2018, our team assisted IDEX in an ambitious web strategy overhaul. IDEX wanted to expand and formalize the content shared on their website to highlight their expertise, share thought leadership, and feature customer stories. Their current website was very product-focused driving to their B2B catalog. This strategy change lead to a major redesign, which led to a major upgrade to Magento 2.0 as the primary eCommerce infrastructure.
Scoping Out The Project
The project came in three phases. First the redesign and content planning, second a Wordpress CMS build (handled by their design firm), finally a migration, integration and replatform to Magento 2.0 (on premise).
Multiple teams inside IDEX - from JD Edwards, Content, Customer Service, and Marketing - were all involved in the project, along with three separate agencies.
Migrating The Website
Bear Group helped drive the commerce migration and development. The original Magento 1.0 site had been built many years prior by another agency with several complex, custom integrations which were difficult to support and maintain. Integrations built for the old website would have to be re-integrated with the new website, which also made IDEX’s update the perfect opportunity to clean up issues with their JD Edwards integration.
We conducted a system audit to document any custom-built features, find the correct data and content migration path, and plan how features would need to be rebuilt.
A New Redesign
The redesign of the website’s theme means visitors to the IDEX website will see improvements to product category navigation, search, and filtering features. The navigation, account and cart status is coordinated seamlessly between Drupal and Magento using an AJAX mechanism. Visitors on the IDEX website will experience the two integrated platforms as a single website.
It was a large undertaking, but the new content and commerce approach repositioned the IDEX brand to better showcase their thought leadership, while the upgraded platforms provide a stable infrastructure for growing their commerce.