Bishop Company Version 9 Migration Case Study

The Bishop Company is the industry-leading distributor of top-quality tools and equipment for professional arborists and landscapers. The company’s clientele ranges from private tradesmen to authorized retailers across the US. With the support of HCL Commerce V7 ending in 2021, and considering the benefits of V9, the company’s Senior Director decided to move forward with the migration. The first decision made was to move the WCS (now HCL Commerce) server from an on-premise Windows server to the cloud. There is a clear fear of latency when moving the Commerce server away from the I Series 570 running A+ , an ERP legacy into the cloud.

During the integration testing phase, the orders were taking 10 times longer to complete. With repeated tests, the results were the same. This would not be an acceptable result.

A simple solution was discovered: turn on a feature called, “connection pooling” on the iSeries. When the Commerce server tried to make a request to the iSeries, a connection was made and destroyed after use. With connection pooling enabled, a connection created was reused many times until it was no longer needed. Problem solved! An order submission came back to its original expectations of 2 seconds.

But the challenge was not over.

Extended integration testing revealed a second problem; as a shopper added more than 1 item in the shopping cart, the checkout process slowed down proportionally with the number of items in the shopping cart and came to a halt. Upon close inspection, we found out that there is logic to recalculate price for every single item in the shopping cart. Why? Because the price may change while items are in the cart. How often does price change? For The Bishop Company, the only upload a new price list once a day so we added a new business rule to recalculate the price for items that have been in the cart longer than 24 hours. Price recalculation by the backend A+ is not needed for 80% of the order items. Response time came back to 2 seconds again.

The Bishop Company is very pleased with its 2 second response time.  And as an added value, they did not have to change their storefront, built based on Mobiecom, after the V9 migration was completed. The storefront works perfectly against the new back-end.