Keith McCormick, Senior Director of The Bishop Company, successfully migrated his online store, www.bishco.com, to WCS (now HCL) Version 9 from Version 7, with the support of Zobrist Software Group. Founded in 1946, 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 United States. With the support for WCS V7 ending in 2020, and considering the benefits of V9, Keith decided to move forward with the V9 migration.

We had the opportunity to catch up with Keith to speak about his migration experience.

Q. Overall, how was the experience of the V9 migration?

Keith – Totally seamless. There were no hiccups. I really didn’t have to do much of anything after the testing phase, which was my main involvement. I spent about 18 hours total in the testing phase. In fact, we received several orders the first night after the migration was complete! Zobrist did a fantastic job of making this easy for us.

Q. How do you like V9?

Keith – The new V9 is fantastic! With the new Management Center, now we can create charts, tables, bookmarks, embed images within text, etc. My ability to enhance the body of the PDP page is greatly expanded. Sequencing products is faster and cleaner. Of course Smart Merchandiser works well with V9, where I can drag and drop and apply rules like resequencing based on units sold or dollars. It is totally visual which makes it faster and a more efficient use of time. It saves me a ton of time!

Q. How did your architecture change?

Keith – Our WCS was on local servers and now it’s on Amazon servers. This move relieves so much worry about running out of space, backups, upgrades. And now we have the freedom to scale. I understand that any architecture modifications in the future will be faster, easier and less costly with the use of dockers.

I am glad we did not have to touch our front-end with Mobiecom once the V9 migration was complete. It continues to load really fast. I am just very pleased.

Teresa Zobrist, President & CEO of Zobrist Software Group, commented on the migration, “I think there is a lot of fear out there about migrating, and we are excited to let companies know that our job as an HCL Business Partner is to take all the complexity away, to make the migration a seamless, easy process and nothing to be afraid of.” “The Bishop Company migration is an example of how we view our role – not only to make the process easy for them, but to be an active partner who cares, so their business can continue to innovate and be ahead of the next-generation user experience, now and into the future.”

If you’re interested in learning about a V9 migration for your company, please reach out to us contactus@zobristinc.com.