Virco: Custom SAP ERP Integration with Drupal 7

Virco: Custom SAP ERP Integration with Drupal 7

SUMMARY

Virco sought Drupal experts through iSpace, an IT staffing firm in Southern California, to integrate their SAP ERP system into Drupal to give customers visibility into their orders status. iSpace, being a long-time partner on Drupal projects, brough in Facet to assess and execute the custom development. Along the way Facet identified Drupal security, configuration, and infrastructure optimizations to reduce overhead and drive value on each release. 

 

Launch Virco

Launch iSpace

 

 

 

Challenge

Virco was looking to integrate their SAP ERP system to give customers a place to login and view their order statuses online. Through Facet’s initial Drupal assessment, we noticed glaring issues with Drupal best practices, and quickly moved to stabilize the system’s security and operations.

Insight

Virco’s needs were simple: dependable Drupal configuration, development, and deployment operations to ensure smooth security updates and new feature development. Virco's marketing operations should never hit friction due to the Drupal editor site experience. 

Solution

Tooling. Drupal development best practices.

  • Rebuild the Drupal website with a Drush Make file, thereby properly documenting customizations to Drupal core and contrib modules, and reducing maintenance costs for future security updates.

  • Export configuration to Drupal Features modules, documenting the in-database configuration, and reducing the risk with deployments.

  • Implement site-wide caching, including opcode, entity, memory, reverse proxy, and content delivery network (CDN). 

  • Update VPS infrastructure configuration, implementing modern deployment and backup techniques with git, AWS S3, and appropriate server imaging.

  • Reduce site application code security risk by removing the nested WordPress site installed and moving to its own, separately jailed directory.

Process. Develop the right thing.

  • Value-Driven Development. Work with Virco stakeholders to identify key business goals, navigate significant technology gaps, and better prioritize ongoing development for desired business outcomes.

Automation. DevOps workflows to reduce deployment overhead. 

  • Integrated off-production server development workflow with Pantheon. 

  • Reduce deployment costs by writing shell scripts to manage Pushing and Pulling to and from Pantheon and the VPS.

  • Integrate SAP for on-site Order History checking by customers.

Results

Refactoring Virco’s codebase to use best practices for Drupal configuration and deployment management reduced the cost of security updates and ongoing features development. Along the way, we were able to improve the end-user experience, improving page load speeds and cleaning up dead ends on the site.

75% Faster

Page Load Speeds