MaxPortal Replacing a Slow In-House Order System

Overview

Eurofins is one of the world's leading laboratory testing and services companies, providing analytical testing services to clients across multiple industries including pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, environmental sciences, and consumer products. With a global network of laboratories and a large customer base, Eurofins needed a reliable, high-performance way for customers to place orders online.

Veriland Consulting delivered MaxPortal — a purpose-built commerce platform that replaced Eurofins' slow, in-house web ordering system. MaxPortal decoupled the customer-facing storefront from Dynamics AX 2012 R3, eliminating the crippling performance issues caused by the previous system's direct database queries against the live ERP.

The Challenge

Eurofins had developed an in-house web ordering system to allow customers to browse services and place orders online. However, the system had a fundamental architectural flaw: it queried Dynamics AX 2012 directly for every page load, product lookup, and order submission.

• Severe performance issues: The in-house website retrieved data directly from the live AX 2012 database. Every customer interaction — browsing catalogues, checking prices, placing orders — triggered real-time queries against the ERP, resulting in unacceptable page load times and frequent timeouts.
• Impact on ERP performance: The web traffic generated by customer sessions competed with internal AX users for database resources. During busy periods, the ordering portal slowed down internal operations across finance, logistics, and laboratory management.
• Poor customer experience: Slow response times and intermittent errors frustrated customers and drove order abandonment. Eurofins risked losing business to competitors with more reliable digital ordering channels.
• Scalability ceiling: The tightly coupled architecture meant the system could not handle growing order volumes without degrading performance for both external customers and internal staff.
• Maintenance burden: The bespoke in-house system was difficult to maintain and extend. Adding new features or catalogues required changes that risked further destabilising the already fragile integration with AX.

Our Solution

Veriland replaced the in-house ordering system with MaxPortal — a commerce platform designed to integrate with Dynamics AX 2012 without placing any direct load on the ERP database during customer browsing and ordering.

MaxPortal Commerce Platform

MaxPortal is Veriland's commerce solution built specifically for organisations running Microsoft Dynamics. Rather than querying AX directly, MaxPortal maintains its own optimised data store that is synchronised with AX through scheduled and event-driven integrations. This architecture ensures that customer-facing pages load instantly, regardless of what is happening inside the ERP.

Decoupled Architecture

The key architectural change was decoupling the web storefront from the AX database. MaxPortal synchronises product catalogues, pricing, and availability from AX on a scheduled basis, while orders placed by customers are queued and pushed into AX asynchronously. This eliminates the direct database dependency that was crippling performance.

Order Management & Fulfilment

Customers can browse the full service catalogue, configure orders, and submit them through a responsive, fast web interface. Orders flow into Dynamics AX 2012 automatically for fulfilment and invoicing, with real-time status updates pushed back to the portal so customers can track progress.

Seamless AX Integration

MaxPortal integrates bi-directionally with Dynamics AX 2012 R3 — pulling catalogue data, customer accounts, and pricing from the ERP, and writing back confirmed orders, payments, and customer updates. The integration layer handles data transformation, validation, and error handling to ensure consistency between the two systems.

Key Results

The migration from the in-house system to MaxPortal transformed Eurofins' online ordering experience and eliminated the performance issues that had plagued both customers and internal users.

• Dramatically faster page loads: Customer-facing pages load instantly from MaxPortal's optimised data store instead of waiting for live AX queries — eliminating the timeouts and slow responses that frustrated customers.
• ERP performance restored: With web traffic no longer hitting the AX database directly, internal users experienced improved ERP performance during peak ordering periods.
• Improved customer experience: A fast, reliable ordering portal reduced order abandonment and gave customers confidence in Eurofins' digital channel.
• Scalable for growth: MaxPortal's decoupled architecture can handle increasing order volumes without impacting ERP performance, supporting Eurofins' growth plans.
• Reduced maintenance overhead: Moving from a bespoke in-house system to a proven commerce platform reduced the development and support burden on Eurofins' IT team.
• Reliable order processing: Asynchronous order integration with AX ensures orders are processed reliably even during high-traffic periods, with full error handling and retry logic.

Technology Stack

Eurofins' commerce platform is built on Veriland's MaxPortal integrated with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3.

Dynamics AX 2012 R3

Enterprise ERP handling order fulfilment, invoicing, customer accounts, and back-office operations across Eurofins' laboratory services business.

MaxPortal

Veriland's commerce platform providing a fast, customer-facing storefront with its own optimised data layer, decoupled from the ERP database.

Integration Layer

Bi-directional integration between MaxPortal and AX 2012 synchronising catalogues, pricing, orders, and customer data with scheduled and event-driven sync.

Web Platform

Responsive web application enabling customers to browse services, configure orders, and track fulfilment status from any device.