E-Buying Support to Major Government Research Facility

XYZ Research (name withheld)

Background

Fulcrum IT brought its decades of experience in streamlining e-business activities to the aid of one of the leading research facilities in the world. This facility is involved in specialized scientific activities and has a continual need to quickly procure equipment, including high-performance desktop computers that are standardized and optimized. Most importantly, it must be tracked discretely for security purposes as the facility ordered equipment from a variety of manufacturers and vendors.

Challenge

In the past, this facility's purchasing process included electronic order, asset management, and credit card purchasing systems. These database systems helped greatly in managing orders. However, they were not fully integrated with each other or with the resellers. Orders had to be manually keyed into the existing, client-based ordering system, faxed to the reseller, and then updated in the disparate back-end systems. Multiple levels of approval to ensure quality and standardization complicated the process. As a result, the process from ordering to receiving the product on the desktop was sometimes long and arduous.

Solution

Working closely with the facility's IT department, Fulcrum IT developed an integrated Buyer-side Electronic Ordering System (EOS) that allows scientists and engineers to select and configure desktop machines, submit them for approval by procurement staff, and automatically order them from internal and external vendor catalogs. From the end-user's perspective, machine selection, configuration, approval, and ordering all take place seamlessly from within a single Web application available on a secure intranet location. The application automates many of the complicated purchasing decisions that had to previously be made manually by end-users. This includes assignment of accounting codes and selection of technical release representatives.

Results

As soon as an order is placed by the Fulcrum IT-designed buyer-side EOS, it flows automatically through our seller-side system to the provided vendors, without human interaction that could lead to mistakes in the ordering process. The product is shipped automatically to a staging area maintained by Fulcrum IT, then delivered to the end user's desktop. During the delivery phase, Fulcrum IT scans a bar code on each unit and adds a facility-specific property tag number to the machine. Fulcrum IT also scans the IDs of the deliverer and the person receiving the box. The property, receiving, and delivery date information is then uploaded automatically into Fulcrum IT's seller-side system and automatically flows through to the buyer-side system and Property Management System. Credit cards are charged automatically via electronic interfaces between both the buyer-side and seller-side systems and credit card processors. Consequently these systems, which were previously separate, are fully integrated.

Interaction between all of the onlne systems for product configuration and ordering is via XML transactions based on the xCBL e-commerce standard. The facility's buyer-side system is based on a back-end Oracle database. Fulcrum IT's seller-side system is based on Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 and Biztalk Server 2000. Many of the vendors provided catalog and ordering systems based on a Microsoft and Intel platform.