Jam Difus’ chooses Synolia for its digital overhaul

From its production workshop in the heart of the Dombes region, north of Lyon, the SME produces, prepares, and ships its customers’ made-to-measure orders. As a pure player, the Jam Difus’ group sells its various types of adhesives through several brands (Film pour vitre, Luminis, Variance Auto).

Growing fast, the company relies on its various e-commerce sites to develop its business.

A platform overhaul project

In 2020, following the acquisition of a competitor, the company decided to overhaul the Film pour vitre e-commerce platform. It was also an opportunity to evolve the online store to support its growth ambitions.

To sustain its success and support its revenue, the group needed a platform that could adapt to the film-cutting business while delivering strong commercial performance.

To ensure the project’s success, the company chose to work with a platform overhaul expert: Synolia. Its teams worked hand in hand with the Jam Difus’ technical team, which handles the day-to-day development, maintenance, and evolution of the group’s various online stores.

Assessing the existing setup

The first step of Synolia’s support was to assess the existing setup. This initial phase made it possible to identify what to keep and what to improve during the overhaul. It was essential to understand the current pain points and the expectations of each business team before starting the replatforming. This phase was carried out together with the Jam Difus’ group teams (technical, management, marketing…).

To get a complete picture, Synolia’s technical teams first carried out a technical audit of the existing PrestaShop platform. It helped guide the decisions to be made: should they upgrade to a newer version? Start over on a new technical foundation? Choose another e-commerce solution?

Replatforming, upgrade, or new solution?

For a merchant, making the right decision is not always easy. The fears and concerns surrounding a replatforming or a major upgrade of the solution that generates a large share of revenue often cloud business leaders’ judgment about the right strategy to adopt. With more than 15 years of e-commerce projects, from the simplest to the most complex, Synolia has the perspective needed to guide any strategic decision.

After analyzing Film pour vitre’s existing setup, the decision was made to carry out a technical overhaul of the platform. Many custom developments had been built on the site but were no longer relevant and were weighing the platform down, making it difficult to maintain. In short, the technical legacy had become too heavy to carry given the company’s goal of rapid growth.

Choosing PrestaShop

In the end, the technology choice was PrestaShop, based on several factors:

• Strong knowledge of PrestaShop among the technical, business, and marketing teams
• Easier data migration between PrestaShop 1.6 and 1.7
• The solution’s ability, when well developed, to support the company’s growth without requiring excessive budgets

Previously, every time a customer created a personalized product, a new SKU was created in the system. A new architecture was therefore proposed, sticking as closely as possible to the solution’s standard while meeting the specific needs of the business. It no longer creates new SKUs, because it allows products to be created on the fly.

Training the teams

Once the specifications for the most important parts of the project were complete, the Jam Difus’ teams needed to be trained.

Synolia’s Systems team first set up the technical stacks (Docker), then trained the end users. The Docker stack increased the technical team’s productivity, improved collaboration, and made it possible to maintain the current platform while developing the new one, thanks to containers and the different PrestaShop versions.

Synolia then trained the Jam Difus’ technical team in development on the new e-commerce platform so they would know all the best practices and quickly become autonomous and efficient.

Putting it into action

After this training, the Jam Difus’ team was ready to carry out the overhaul in the best possible conditions. Even so, Synolia continued its support throughout the site’s development to make sure the project worked. In particular, it carried out regular code reviews. Its e-commerce team also provided technical assistance as needed whenever Jam Difus’ faced complex development issues. Finally, Synolia helped the teams with final acceptance testing so the online platform would deliver the highest possible quality to customers.

“Synolia was a true ally in delivering our project. We could count on the teams’ responsiveness and expertise throughout. The teams adapted to our organization (and to its changes). They made themselves available when we needed them most. We moved forward within an agile framework, step by step, in a structured way,” says Emir Bourouis.