The Customer

A B2B Exchange for organic foods, based in France, with operations initially in Europe and America, expanding to South America and south-east Asia.

The Challenge

It was required to completely design the B2B exchange required for this operation, in order to enable large-value commodity transactions of organic foods on the International market. This required incorporation of workflows for organic certification and verification, international credit checking and payment processing, sample request and processing, international shipping and insurance, and international export and import control laws. It was also required to design and set up the technology infrastructure completely for the customer's processing center, in order to provide the required transaction volume handling capacity.

The Solution

It was clear from an initial study of the customer's requirement that the B2B platform would require a considerable amount of customization. Thus, rather than choose a very large, complicated package, it was decided to choose one which gave all the core functionality required, and to use that as the base for further development. This approach gave the customer a very significant advantage in the initial cost of the software, and also the amount of time and effort required to customize it to their needs.

The entire technology infrastructure was designed around a 3-tier enterprise computing architecture, to allow for the maximum performance and scalability. Since our customer was already partnered with IBM, all the hardware and software were built around IBM technology. After doing a preliminary cost analysis, and on the basis of support provided by IBM, Analytica recommended a solution built around the Linux operating system - a decision that would potentially save the customer over 1.8 million Euros in the first year alone.

The entire back end order processing engine was built using the Analytica's Work++ Workflow Engine, and complemented the chosen B2B software. All required customizations related to international financial, shipping, insurance and vendor verification transactions were built on top of this infrastructure. This slashed the development time by 60%, and also allowed the customer the flexibility to modify and extend the back end processing workflow at any time.

The entire project is currently in progress, with 2 of 16 modules (including the entire core software) customized and deployed to their entire satisfaction in under 4 months, well within the 6 months our customer had budgeted to go live.