Ecommerce Case Study

Applications Built & Deployed

• Restocking – automatic purchase order generation based on restock thresholds, tracking ETAs, and assess demand on over 50,000 SKUs across 80+ vendors, etc.
• Special Order Handling – order on demand for tens of thousands of items from approximately 100 suppliers in real time.
• Pick and Ship – handles over 100,000 orders per year, batch picking 50 orders at a time rather that individually.
• Warehouse Receiving (ROG) – logging receipt of goods against the responsible PO, updating the e-commerce inventory in real time, tracking ETA dates and inbound quantities, etc.
• Bill of Materials – for our manufacturing division, detailed and constantly updated costing of labor and materials for all manufactured goods, detailed component inventory usage based on builds, feeds into purchase order generation for restocking components needed for manufacturing.
• Drop Ship Automation – splitting orders and automatically sending drop ship requests to suppliers while shipping the stocked goods themselves.
• Production Orders – yet to be built; this will manage the manufacturing process and allow a customer to see live information on where their order is in the production process.
• Merchandising – front end catalog merchandising app for our sites to market the right products to the right customers.
• General Warehousing – inventory recounts, location assignments, etc.
• Reports – all management reporting. This is a constantly evolving list.

Ease of Change & Maintainability

FreshTrends' AppSynergy-based system has all the attributes that are far too often missing in deployments of this type, including ease of understanding and ease of change. You can consider changes in two categories:

• a routine change – something like adding a field to the database, getting that on a form and providing formatting and validation, and
• a larger change – like adding a new module, which might interact with several modules, as it would have to be set up, maintained and carried all the way through the system and reporting.

Routine changes typically takes a few minutes or at most an hour or two, and can be deployed immediately into production. A larger change like a new application module might take anywhere from a couple of days to a week or two at most. All these changes are done "hot" meaning there is no shutting the system down and the user will get the change in the next refresh.

When asked to compare that with his experience with other custom development he laughed. Even the simplest change starts a work flow of specing, quoting, scheduling, development, QA, etc., etc., with the entire process taking months and often wrong upon delivery. He said that turnaround time of hours or days (instead of months) changes how you think about problems, not just the cost of the solution.