CED Group

CED Group has a broad and complex offering. More than 100 courses for primary education, childcare and specialised education. A web shop with physical and digital products such as methodologies, teaching materials and support tools. In 2023, over 30,000 professionals used their services, products and courses.

All that information is managed centrally in AllSolutions, their ERP system. Products, courses, prices, availability, participant lists - everything is in AllSolutions. The website must always display that correctly and orders and registrations must flow directly and flawlessly back to the ERP.

The challenge: build a platform that combines two web shops with an informative website, that communicates seamlessly with AllSolutions and that runs reliably for tens of thousands of professionals who use its offerings every day.

We built cedgroep.nl based on a design by L5, as a combination of Craft CMS for the informative website and Craft Commerce for the two web shops. One for products such as methodologies, workbooks and teaching materials. One for courses including registration options, dates and participant spaces.

The core of the platform is the link with AllSolutions. This ERP system provides extensive API functionality that creates configurable endpoints to communicate with the website. We built two synchronisation mechanisms that run side by side.

The nightly full synchronisation refreshes all products, courses and related data at once. This ensures that the website is always up-to-date with the latest information from AllSolutions. In between, minor changes are synchronised in real time so that changes are immediately visible on the website without waiting for the nightly sync.

Orders and course registrations coming in through the web shops are forwarded directly to AllSolutions for processing and logistics.

Building a link is one thing. Building a link that runs reliably for tens of thousands of professionals who place orders and book courses every day is something else.

The biggest challenge was in error handling. When an order or registration is not processed properly for whatever reason, this must be immediately visible and recovery must be able to be controlled. An order silently disappearing is unacceptable when 30,000 professionals depend on the system every day.

We therefore invested a lot of time in a balanced logging system with a task queue. Every synchronisation, every order and every entry is logged. Tasks that go wrong are not silently ignored but kept in the queue with a clear error message. After analysing the cause, tasks can be re-run one by one once the blockage is removed. This way, data is never lost and every problem is recoverable.

Craft CMS as the basis for the informative website and content management. Craft Commerce for two full-fledged webshops. Tailwind CSS for the front-end styling. AllSolutions ERP connection via configurable API endpoints. Nightly full synchronisation of all products and courses. Real-time synchronisation for interim adjustments. Task queue with extensive logging and error handling. Fully responsive on desktop, tablet and mobile.

CED Group has a platform that clearly presents and sells their full range of courses and products to more than 30,000 professionals in education and childcare. Orders and registrations are automatically processed in AllSolutions. Synchronisation runs reliably day and night. And if something goes wrong, it is immediately visible and repairable.

We have been working with CED Group since 2015. In those years, the platform has undergone several further developments and grown with the organisation.

With a platform used daily by tens of thousands of professionals, reliability is not a feature but a prerequisite. You don't notice when things go well. You do notice when things go wrong.

That insight has fundamentally influenced our approach to logging and error handling. Not only at CED Group but at all platforms where we build links to external systems. Comprehensive logging, a task queue and a clear recovery process are now a standard part of our approach.