Case Study - Illumina

Illumina

Illumina reimagined its commerce experience with a microservices-based architecture from Elastic Path that accelerated online sales while delivering a best-in-class customer experience.

Industry

Medical Devices

Use Case

B2B Replatform

Product

Self-Managed Commerce

Partner

Deloitte

Who They Are

Illumina is the global leader in DNA sequencing, serving its customers in the research, clinical, and applied markets.

Illumina came to Elastic Path when their existing platform, IBM Websphere, was reaching end of life. Rigid, outdated, and slow-performing the solution hindered the team from achieving their commerce goals and resulted in a sub-par customer experience.

Elastic Path partnered with Illumina to reimagine their commerce experience and provide a microservices-based architecture that enables the team to meet their goal, accelerate online sales while delivering a best-in-class customer experience.

A scientist with protective glasses on examines a swap stick

Illumina's Commerce Challenge

A B2B business model, Illumina works with various businesses and corporations, including customers buying directly off their site, distributors and channel partners, and eProcurement channels. These complex customer groupings require a nuanced eCommerce strategy, it became apparent that the existing solution did not have the flexibility to meet the customer experience they aspired to obtain.

Sub-Par Customer Experience: Incohesive customer journey with purchasing and technical limitations.
Revenue Growth Challenges: Quote redemption restrictions, slow site performance, technical limitations that discouraged channel adoption.
Obsolete Technology: Out-dated slow performing system with limited capabilities to integrate into other systems in Illumina’s ecosystem.
Repetitive Manual Tasks: Lack of automation, slow site performance forcing the customer care and service teams to spend time manually executing orders and tasks.

Why Illumina Chose Elastic Path

Illumina knew they wanted to take a headless commerce approach and would need to replatform to a cutting-edge technology to enable them to customize the user experience. In their path to replatforming they had four main goals:

All Purchasing Online: Enable Illumina users to purchase online any Illumina product regardless of type, channel, or product class.
Support Global Expansion: Deliver best-in-class website performance on a global level and support purchasing methods and devices that are required at a regional level.
Deliver Best-In-Class Customer Experience: Improve the customer’s path to purchase, create a true omnichannel experience with front and back-end integration.
Ensure Long-Term Stability: With the existing provider, IBM Websphere being end of life, select an eCommerce vendor that can partner and support Illumina’s long-term goals.