Commerce Mind Nexus is a free framework we have built to help our clients improve their background processes and data flows, but above all to give visibility and control over them to non-technical people.
Commerce Mind Nexus is a free framework we have built to help our clients improve their background processes and data flows, but above all to give visibility and control over them to non-technical people.
Take me to the documentation directly instead.
In an e-commerce solution there are many occasions when different events should trigger flows and data has to be sent between systems. This is often especially clear in a composable solution but the same challenges appear regardless of architecture. One example is when an order is placed. A number of things then have to happen for the order to actually be completed. It has to be sent to the ERP/OMS, sent to the recommendation engine and BI, an order confirmation email has to be sent, and so on.
The naive solution is to do all of that at the same time as the customer clicks the Buy button, but that is not particularly sustainable. If some step in the flow does not work as it should, you need to be able to rerun just that step in isolation. Maybe the order confirmation could not be sent but the order export went fine, then only the order confirmation should be rerun. And we do not exactly want to have to call the customer and ask them to click the Buy button again just to rerun our flows.
This is exactly where Nexus comes in to simplify setting up, monitoring and giving visibility into these flows. Often only developers or technicians have visibility into these flows, but one of Nexus's strengths is making them visible to non-technical people too. With the Nexus web interface anyone can log in and quickly see that, for example, the order export is not working, and also do simpler troubleshooting themselves and try to run the export again.
In practice, Nexus is a framework in .NET that gives developers tools to focus on solving their task and not have to think about everything around it: error handling, timing and providing visibility to the business. What developers build automatically becomes visible, monitorable and secured.
Cervera is on a transformation journey where they are moving their IT environment and replacing their ERP, as well as changing a number of integrations with surrounding systems. The previous solution was very hard to control on a daily basis and to understand whether an integration was working or not.
"Commerce Mind Nexus is a stable product that works well when it comes to handling our integrations. What stands out is the visual overview and the ability to easily get emails when there is a problem, see if something has gone wrong, and rerun that job with one click."
- Rasmus Andersson, CTO Cervera
Today, flows around orders to the ERP, invoicing system, purchasing system and analytics data are connected to Nexus, and everything works exactly as intended.
By continuously moving orchestration and monitoring of jobs to Commerce Mind Nexus, they have not only gained higher stability, they have above all been able to move control of the integrations out to the business and the relevant staff. For example, they have the visual health check displayed on a screen in the office so everyone can quickly and easily see real-time information about the flows that are running and see if something is not working. That allows Cervera to work more efficiently and react faster to any problems.
Lyko's problem is a complex IT environment in constant change, with many companies in the group where needs shift, and they have to handle everything from B2C to 3PL flows with customers and vendors. Because many challenges require customisation, Lyko has a high degree of in-house development of systems on top of and around their ERP. In 2023 the need arose for a simple, flexible and scalable solution to manage control of all flows, and Commerce Mind proposed Nexus.
The first project was to use Nexus directly in the core of the systems, the in-house-developed OMS. The internal developers liked the ability to easily see logs and problems, the robust well-documented functionality, and that Nexus enabled the teams to have high speed in development.
"You can easily and quickly see what you need; the visual side of it is incredibly important."
- Nils Ajaxon, Systems Developer Lyko
Peter Gunnarsson, CTO at Lyko, sees Nexus as a very capable tool for control over processes and for handling flows that cut across the company's different parts. An order out to a customer can, for example, consist of both in-stock and 3PL items that then have to be brought together. Many processes have to start, and you need to know if they go wrong or stop for some reason.
"One thing that makes Nexus fit so well into our systems landscape is the concept around adapters, which gives flexible support and enables quick implementation of new integrations, connectors or calculations where we get high visibility out of the box. It helps and is used, among other things, around the connection between our different companies for one and the same order."
- Peter Gunnarsson, CTO Lyko
Nexus has become an important cog in Lyko's development, both as support between internal systems and in the connections out to the digital and physical sales channels. We at Commerce Mind are proud of that.
Nothing. We offer it free under an Open Source licence to our clients. Commerce Mind is an independent expert company in e-commerce and retail, and independence is very important to us. By offering Nexus for free and as Open Source, you as an e-commerce operator get full visibility and control. You do not get locked in, and you have every opportunity to evaluate Nexus against other alternatives. Our only incentive is that it is fun the more people use it and get value from it.
Getting control over your data flows and background processes is something many e-commerce operators struggle with, and it rarely works optimally. Often that is because developers are tasked with solving one specific flow at a time but then do not take the time to look at the whole. At the very bottom of the backlog there may be a story to investigate whether an integration engine could make things better, but both the cost and the effort of integrating it mean that story keeps sitting at the bottom.
That is why we built Nexus, so that developers can continue to focus on one flow at a time and build it as efficiently as possible, and be able to rely on Nexus to make sure the whole holds together. And so that the business gets the right tools for monitoring, troubleshooting and tools for non-technical people. We have boiled down our experience from 30+ e-commerce solutions into something we ourselves want to use to solve the challenges we know you face.
Nexus can be integrated without problem into an existing application, so if you have an integration that would benefit from becoming a bit more stable, it can be worth taking a look at Nexus.
You can also run many different applications with Nexus in the same landscape, for example in a (micro)service architecture. Often these services have internal needs with background processes and data flows, and then you can without issue run an internal Nexus in the services that need it.
Nexus is created to solve real problems based on experience, without any hidden motives beyond wanting to make life easier for every e-commerce operator.
Read more about Nexus in the technical documentation here:
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