MonotaRO is one of Japan's leading B2B eCommerce companies, selling tools, industrial supplies, safety equipment, and electrical components to manufacturers, MROs, and trade buyers. Iksula partnered with MonotaRO across two parallel workstreams: stabilizing and re-platforming the Indonesia storefront, and upgrading the Japan storefront before Adobe end-of-support.
The Indonesia storefront was running on Magento Enterprise with compounding problems. A previous migration attempt to Magento 2 had stalled with the prior vendor, with no documentation handed off. First-time page loads were slow, indexing was sluggish, downtime was a recurring risk, and the Magento Enterprise license was adding roughly $40K in annual cost without proportional value. The UI/UX was primitive and capping the customer journey.
The Japan storefront faced a different pressure. Magento 2.3.6.p1 was hitting end of support (quality fixes ending July 2021, software and security fixes ending April 2022). The platform had to move to 2.3.7.p2 with zero interruption to a live B2B order pipeline.
I led product across both workstreams from a Mumbai-based delivery team into a Tokyo-headquartered client. For Indonesia, I owned the discovery effort to unwind what the previous vendor had left undocumented, then defined a phase-wise migration plan from Magento Enterprise to Magento Open Source with performance optimization sequenced ahead of feature work. I wrote acceptance criteria around the metrics the business actually cared about: first-time page load, cached and un-cached response times, indexing duration, and application availability. I rebuilt the documentation layer the prior vendor never produced, so the platform would remain maintainable after the engagement.
For Japan, I scoped the 2.3.6.p1 to 2.3.7.p2 upgrade against the Adobe EOL calendar, defined the regression UAT plan, and managed a phased cutover designed to keep the live order pipeline running. I ran weekly status cadences with MonotaRO stakeholders to surface risks early, kept acceptance criteria tight, and coordinated dependencies across engineering, QA, and the client business team.
Measured. Documented. Repeatable.
"Platform migrations are a product craft, not a developer task. The Indonesia engagement was a case study in inherited mess: a failed vendor handoff, missing documentation, performance debt compounding with license cost. The job was as much about rebuilding institutional knowledge and earning client trust as it was about shipping the migration. Running delivery for a Tokyo-based client from Mumbai also taught me how much quality depends on async-friendly documentation and clearly written acceptance criteria. Whatever was not written down would get lost in translation.