Adobe Success Story

To build a dynamic site from which corporate customers can log in, and within a secure and customized experience, view product catalog, place orders, and check order status and history.

Benefits

· Using ColdFusion intuitive tag-based language, team quickly built and deployed Web-based business application.
· ColdFusion open architecture allowed for easy integration of backend legacy system and online customer care center.
· With new procurement system, the average Web order is $14 more than a traditional order.
· Now, one customer service rep can handle an account volume that previously required three or four reps.

Project Details

In the intensely competitive market for non-production materials—such as office supplies, furniture, stationary, cleaning supplies and computer equipment—winning strategies emphasize razor-thin margins through streamlined, automated procurement. But, at the same time, corporate customers want personalized pricing and integration with their internal accounting and financial systems for greater control.

Unlike customers in conventional dot.com business models, these corporate customers seek feature-rich business-to-business (B2B) applications that offer the convenience of online shopping carts and catalogs, but with negotiated volume pricing and the control of corporate purchasing processes. It's a tall order, but one that Allied Office Products has been meeting with its B2B extranet.

At this site, Allied's corporate customers can log in and—with appropriate security and customization—view their company's approved product catalog, place orders (routed to appropriate approvers before they're fulfilled), and see order status and history.

"Allied has grown very rapidly in the past few years through acquisition and our online strategy has been integral to that success," said Ken DesRochers, vice president of e-Commerce, Allied Office Products. "For today's customers, online procurement is a requirement. If your customers can't order, approve, and manage their procurement online, you don't get their business."

Allied's current site is a complete replacement of its previous site and infrastructure, which was a no-frills Active Server Pages-based site. "That was fine at first," DesRochers said. "It was a simple office-supply ordering site, but there was no integration with our legacy systems and it didn't scale at all. We'd create and load custom pricing catalogs for each customer every quarter. We would change them all manually. Then we had an automated program to perform the updates, but even running 24 x 7, it took months to complete. The site wasn't designed to accommodate the level of growth and complexity Allied soon required."

Macromedia: Allied's E-Business Platform

To take its site to the next level—and manage its e-business growth for at least the next 24 months—Allied turned to CHC Solutions, a Premier Macromedia Alliance Consulting Partner. CHC Solutions recommended an infrastructure based on Macromedia ColdFusion and Macromedia JRun.

Macromedia ColdFusion is the fastest way to build and deploy powerful Web applications, helping dramatically accelerate Web development with its intuitive tag-based language and integrated database and debugging tools. ColdFusion also includes a powerful Web application server, featuring an open architecture that allows for complete integration with existing enterprise systems, as well as easy-to-use management tools and server clustering to ensure applications perform optimally and are always available.

Macromedia JRun is comprehensive, independent, J2EE-compliant Java application server. JRun combines a highly productive suite of visual tools with an open, standards-based Java application server to provide Java developers with the most powerful solution to design, program, edit, debug and maintain Java servlets, Java Server Pages, and Enterprise Java Beans.

In June of 2000, after completing a comprehensive requirements-gathering and analysis stage in which CHC Solutions defined Allied's strategic architecture, the team began its rapid development cycle. In only four months, the core site was complete. Two months later, additional features for workflow and personalization were added. Since then, CHC Solutions and Allied have released new versions each month.

Enterprise JavaBeans: Real-Time Legacy Integration

ColdFusion and Macromedia Spectra provide all catalog, order entry, and account manipulation functions. When a customer enters an order—with its contracted price—that order enters an Oracle database. Every three minutes, a Java servlet written in JRun invokes an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) to reformat the data and call the back-end system (called TSH or "tish") through MV Internet as an HTTP call. TSH processes the order and returns an order confirmation number to the EJB which passes it to the Oracle database. All of this occurs as a single committed transaction with time-outs and error handling built in.

The system handles price checks in a similar manner. Each customer has its own pricing model in TSH. Whenever a customer adds an item to the shopping cart, the EJB performs a price check against TSH. When the customer checks out, a different EJB retrieves proper tax calculations from TSH based on the customer's location and ship-to address. "We're very pleased with this architecture," said Maniangod. "It is very scalable - handling 300-400 calls per hour and it's handling a huge piece of work that we don't have to deal with any longer. We could have tried some other solutions, like WebSphere or WebLogic, but we needed J2EE compliance at a reasonable price and JRun had it. It's one of simplest application servers for building and deploying EJBs and it's meeting our needs very well."

Putting Customers Online

"Our new e-business infrastructure is having a tremendously positive impact on our operations," said DesRochers. "In the first six months, we've enrolled 2,800 customers. Our goal is to move as many of our customers over to this system as soon as possible - and we expect to reach 10,000 shortly. With this system, the average Web order is $14 more than a traditional order. And our customer service reps can handle more accounts without any drop off in service. Today a rep can handle an account volume that previously would have required three or four reps.

"With AskAllied.com we conform to the customer's procurement process—not vice versa. That makes our solution easier to adopt and that's helping us win and keep happy customers. Macromedia and CHC Solutions have been true partners in helping us accelerate our e-business initiatives and we look forward to extending our partnerships with them as we continue to collaborate to improve our customers' online experience."

Site Summary

Allied Office Products
100 Delawanna Ave.
Clifton, NJ 07014

Macromedia Products:
JRun Enterprise; ColdFusion Enterprise; ColdFusion Studio; Spectra

Hardware:
The Web site runs on Compaq DL-380 and DL-360 multi-processor servers with Pentium 3 866 MHz processors, 18.2 GB (Raid 1 + 1 Hotspace) storage, and 1 GB RAM. JRun is on a Sun E250 server.

Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.51 and Sun Solaris

Database:
Oracle 8i

Size of DB:
8-40 GB of data (depending on peak usage periods)

Internet Connection:
Burstable to 4 Mbps

Site Traffic:
135,000 hits per weekday

Development Team:
7 full-time developers

Macromedia Services:
Open License Program

Macromedia Alliance Partner:
CHC Solutions

Industry: Business Services

Benefits

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