Redefining Excellence in Heavy Equipment Spares

About The Client

Established in 1996, Patriot Engineering Services (PES) is a leading spare parts supplier for heavy equipment, trucks, and passenger vehicles. Close relationships with carefully selected suppliers and years of experience in the industry gives PES a competitive edge in its first-hand knowledge of the intricacies and dynamics of machinery and the importance of quality spare parts.

Project Background

In response to the evolving needs of customers seeking a more efficient and streamlined way to procure products, this project was initiated to develop a sophisticated web application. The client in general has huge volume of product data ranging upto 2 million and these products were not limited as the database is frequently updated and every time when a customer requests for a product our client will have to query the database using a part number and will have to generate a quote. This process often consumes a lot of time where our client idea is to digitize the manual process allowing the customers themselves to search for products based on part number and allowing them to create and submit the products for a quote.

Goal

The I-order project’s objective is to make, the inventory accessible to the client to search for the available products and submit for a quote request. This will expedite the sending of quotation, which normally takes few weeks to complete and increase the revenue of the business.

The application developed will allow the customers to search for products using part numbers and can request for a quote. Customers can search products based on two categories one is genuine and the other is after-market. Customers can submit a quote for products added to a list individually or they can bulk upload products list from an excel sheet. Based on the customer tier, customers will receive different Price level discounts for the products based on the discount configured for price level.

The quotes that were submitted by the customers will be notified to the admin or the sub users through emails. Quotes that were submitted by the customers will be displayed in the quotes list page and quotes which aren’t submitted can be saved as draft to the quote history page which can be edited and submitted later. Admin manages the entire application from the backend where following are the aspects will be managed by admin such as “products”, “sub users”, “customers”, “quotes”, “approvals” and “customer / discount tier configuration.

Project Timeline

The overall timeframe took for the development of the project is 14 weeks.

Challenges

The primary challenge faced was to bulk upload products in the backend to update the products in the existing database. Moreover, the client’s database consists of over 2 million product records which the CSV file doesn’t support and uploaded in multiple text files. Even a minor change in the value of the products would greatly impact the business.