CLIENT
A leading auto glass tools manufacturer in Ohio
OBJECTIVE
The client was looking for a complete eCommerce solution for their product line. In addition, client is a preferred vendor for Safelite. Safelite uses Oracle iProcurement for order processing software for its purchases. Apart from Safelite, client deals with different types of web customers. Client also uses MS Dynamics GP for the purpose of sales and inventory management. The website had to be in sync with client’s Microsoft ERP system. Client chose Touchstone for the development of a web application to take care of online shopping catalogue, order management, user management along with integration and data synchronization between website database and Microsoft Dynamics. This application would make the client’s sales team more efficient by displaying them the availability of various products, level of inventory and estimated availability/ delivery dates in real time. It would also provide various other tools required to systematically complete the order and transfer information to the ERP system.
KEY CHALLENGES
- Building a fully functional website with complete administrative controls
- Communicating with MS Dynamics GP from web site and keep web and MSGP database in sync ( product master, sales master, invoices, customer master, price master etc)
- Integrating with Safelite Oracle iProcurement system
- Integrating with FedEx USPS and UPS webservices and calculate freight charges on the fly taking into account – weight, dimensions and destination
- Integrating online Paymentech payment gateway
- Transferring existing offline customer data of over 200,000 records from ERP system to website database and develop an offline to online conversion mechanism
- Back order notifications, fulfillment & multiple invoice for bulk / blanket orders
- If the material is a BOM, displaying component level material in the item level of quotations, sales orders, shipping / dispatch slips and invoices
OUR SOLUTION
Touchstone provided the following solutions:
- The application deals with different types of customers with different pricing levels
- Customer can browse their order history, product form product catalogue based on the select category
- Customer has option to view product price, product image, product description, and add product to shopping cart upon successful login to this application. Customer has option to view product price, product image, product description, and add product to shopping cart upon successful login to this application
- This application had advanced shopping cart features where customer can update the quantity, remove items, view checkout price, user friendly navigation for placing an order and integrate to use two different shipping providers’ web services (UPS & FedEx)
- Administrators can browse all new orders received; change any order (for customer service), view/edit customer profiles, view payment history, view/edit/add product categories and products including images
- The core functionality of this application is to receive orders from iProcurement (through oracle punch-out XML communication between website and iProcurement), post the XML invoice to iProcurement, synchronize and exchange the data’s between website database and Microsoft Great Plains
- To achieve this core functionality we developed three scheduler programs
- to synchronize and exchange the data’s between website database and Microsoft Great Plains
- receive orders from iProcurement through oracle punch-out via XML
- post invoice to iProcurement in the form of XML. This scheduler program (I) will run automatically on regular interval of every one hour daily and it does the following jobs to synchronize and exchange the data:
a) Transfer web customer data to Microsoft Great Plains
b) Update web customer data to Microsoft Great Plains
c) Transfer web order data to Microsoft Great Plains
d) Update web order data to Microsoft Great Plains
e) Get invoice from Microsoft Great Plains and transfer to web database
f) Update the order status in web database
g) Send invoice and shipping confirmation email to customer
TECHNOLOGY
- ASP.Net, ASPEmail Agent, Webservices
- MS Dynamics GP Web services & APIs, MS SQL
- FedEx and UPS Webservices
- Lucy Payment Gateway Webservices
- Oracle iProcurement APIs