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Online fuel procurement solution for US bunker company
Summary
Bunkering industry provides the right blend of fuel oil to ships at various ports. They act like “gas stations” for ships. eFuelOil.com provides a solution to the problem of transaction costs and transparency by conducting online auctions for each inquiry.
Challenge
Calsoft was approached by eFuelOil.com to develop an online auction web site for selling fuel oil to ships. Currently in this industry (known as bunkering) most deals between ship owners, who want to buy fuel and suppliers are made through brokers. Brokers solicit quotes from vendors they like, compare them, go back to a few they would like to get a second quote from and then close the deal with the lowest priced one.
Solution
Calsoft designed and implemented a simple solution for this business-to-business auction site. Calsoft’s solution provides a way of conducting business for ship owners and their suppliers within the framework of their business rules and without depending on brokers.
To meet the requirements of modularity and flexibility, the system is implemented in three tiers. The Client tier is the user interface implemented in Visual Basic. Requests for information are generated by user actions at this end. These requests are then passed on to the middle tier, which houses the business logic components built using the Distributed Component Object Model. The Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) is used as the object manager for scalability. The middle tier in turn passes requests to the Data Tier, which is hosted, on ORACLE 8.1.5. The data tier merely acts as a persistent store for the information. Changes to the business logic can be made at the middle tier by adding new components. Clients not requiring the modifications can still access the old components
The solution was designed in a generic fashion with many components so that the specific business practices of any industry could be easily incorporated. Calsoft’s solution is designed in the most flexible manner so that the site can be easily administered and changing business rules can be incorporated.
The features of the site include:
- Reverse auctions
- Simultaneous auctions
- Spot auctions
- Custom business rules
- Custom auction screens
- Fax/Email/Page notifications
- Black-listing features
- Reports
- Analysis
- News & other data feeds
- Customer support
- Easy Site Administration
The functional flow of eFueloil.com is as below:
- Registered buyers can place inquiries at eFueloil.com that generates a notification to all or selected participating suppliers
- The buyer can optionally place inquiries for multiple products as well as accept bids for multiple ports.
- Auction is scheduled for the next available 15 minute slot or can be re-scheduled to a suitable time as requested by the buyer
- Suppliers receive notifications via email and fax when a new inquiry is placed or when an existing inquiry is modified.
- Suppliers login to the auction hall to participate in the auction and enter their best bids
- At the end of the 15 minute auction, the supplier who quoted the best price wins the auction and the winner is notified via email and fax
Technology
The auction engine is built using Microsoft Technologies, particularly Windows DNA (Distributed Inter-Networking Architecture) under Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition. All business logic for an auction is encapsulated into components under the Component Object Model (COM) which may be hosted on a Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). The Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition is used as the database server.
The auction logic components are used from Active Server Pages – a high performance application server. This helps keep the site lean and mean without pulling in overhead from complex application servers. The ASP pages are typically deployed on a Web Farm with a back-end database cluster using cluster-certified hardware. This provides high availability, scalability and very good performance for this site.