Auto Metal Direct is an automotive parts distributor specializing in Mopar and GM muscle car and GM truck restoration sheet metal - both in products and in service. They use SouthWare for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, together with Netlink. Their previous site ran on a Windows platform, but they did not have a convenient way to editing their own pages while incorporating e-commerce into their site.
Working very closely with staff at Opus Integrated Business Systems (http://www.opus-is.com), we developed a Joomla SouthWare Netlink integration including component, plugins, and modules from the ground up. These use web services (SOAP) to connect to SouthWare / Netlink and display products, categories, pricing, and so on. Since AMD sells car parts, they also needed a way to filter sequentially by make, model, and year. This is achieved using a dropdown list that is populated via Ajax and SOAP. The search results can be filtered by category, and the filter can be removed from the results in case the results are too limiting. Opus built the web services and much of the Ajax functionality, while we managed the Joomla integration and consumption of web services. The final site is fully SSL-encrypted and features seamless SouthWare e-commerce with Joomla as the framework.
