Electronic Commerce Reporting

Problem:

   A leading company in the leasing of audio and video equipment found that they were spending an inordinate amount of time and money delivering rental/lease rates to production companies throughout the country. While they did maintain a web presence, they wanted to add additional interactivity to allow customers to gather technical and pricing information on products. In addition to product information the company also wanted to display their recent accomplishments. Their lack of an in-house Webmaster presented the need to update the web-site's information and content without technical assistance.

Solution:

   The company's product information was stored on a PICK based system running on NT servers. Beacon's technical staff created a process to extract the required information to be loaded into the new web enabled application's database.

   Early in the design process it was determined that the ability for customers to make selections from the product catalog would speed the ordering process by eliminating the customer service representative's responsibility of taking the order over the telephone. A shopping cart facility would need to be incorporated for customer selection as well as an Action Queue for the customer service representative. The Queue would also need to accommodate multiple branch offices.

   A categorized product catalog was developed that included images, pricing as well as technical information. All of the information in the catalog was updateable through a browser-based utility, including the upload of images to the web server. A similar facility was also added to allow the creation and update of dynamically created Accomplishment Pages.

   As a last touch a Downloadable Document Service was added to allow customer access to lease agreements, credit applications, and other documents.

For Technical Information on the software created to resolve this issue.

The services provide in this case study include:

IT Consulting

Web Integration

Application Software Design and Development

Data Conversion

LAN/WAN Network Development

Structured Systems Analysis and Design