Case Studies

Internet Ordering System Enhances Customer Service Capabilities for Global Beverage Distributor

Project At a Glance

RDA developed an Internet-based product ordering system using Microsoft Azure Services to improve a national distribution company's customer service capabilities. Leveraging the Azure platform enabled our client to quickly bring this system to market without incurring hardware and support costs in their data centers. The solution provides convenience and flexibility for our client's customers to place orders anytime, anywhere. Scale out capability supports future needs.

About Our Client

RDA's client is one of the world's largest marketers, producers and distributors of consumer beverage products.

 

Background

Prior to this project, the only mechanism for small and medium-sized customers to order products from RDA's client was over the telephone either to their sales representative or to a call center. Our client sought to provide an Internet-based online ordering system to better serve their customers.

 

Solution Detail

RDA developed an Azure-based online ordering system that enables small and medium-sized customers to order products from our client. The solution allows customers to place orders from a user-friendly website that dynamically displays their customized list of products, current promotions, order history and contact information for support. Azure provided a robust set of services that allowed for rapid deployment of a Web-based solution that would easily scale as the volume of customers increased.

Silverlight was chosen for the client user interface to provide a rich experience over the Web. The Silverlight client communicated with Web services to provide data and business logic from the existing on-premise systems. The solution contains loosely coupled components that easily support a variety of client interfaces (browser, mobile, etc) as well as new and evolving back-end systems within the enterprise.

Our client initially tasked RDA with developing a proof of concept (POC) for the proposed solution. The key objectives for this POC were identified as:

• Investigate the capabilities of the Microsoft Azure Services to act as a platform for hosting an online ordering application.
• Assess the ability of internally developed Web services to integrate the online ordering system with the back-end SAP and legacy systems.
• Deliver a functioning POC suitable for demonstration.

Following the success of the POC, RDA was given the green light to move forward with the development of a production-ready pilot application to be rolled out to our client's customer community. This included the following:

• Extension and refinement of features included in the POC
• Implementation of new features
• Refinement and stabilization of the solution architecture
• Updates to the user interface for an improved user experience

Benefits

An average of $15M per day in orders is placed over the phone to sales reps and the call center. An Internet-based solution provides convenience and flexibility for our client's customers to place orders anytime, anywhere.

By leveraging the Microsoft Azure platform for this solution, our client is able to quickly bring an application to market without incurring hardware and support costs in their data centers. In addition, scale out capability is already provided in Azure to support future needs.

With the ability to leverage on-premise services, our client was able to provide an external solution without having to rewrite the complex pricing logic or impact other existing ordering mechanisms.

 

Technically Speaking

The Internet ordering solution leverages the Microsoft Azure Services technology platform as well as:

• Silverlight for a rich user experience
• Live ID authentication
• WCF services hosted in Azure to interface with on-premise services
• Azure storage for user profile and order queuing