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An e-Procurement solution for GE Express Training to procure training services
summary
GE Express Training is a leading provider of training services and IT solutions.
Challenge
The company decided to develop a Business-to-Business e-Commerce site, which would provide online auctions of its services. The purpose of this exercise was to motivate the buying public and focus the market’s attention on training services by introducing competition among the service providers.
Solution
Calsoft designed and implemented an e-Commerce site, which allows GE’s training partners to sell their training services by placing them on auctions and corporate users to buy these services either by bidding on auctions or buying them directly from vendors at a fixed price.
The website’s unique catalog navigation methods and search facilities make it easier for its users to search for an auction they are interested in. The site also provides auction alerts that notify users when a new auction satisfying user-specified criteria is placed. The user specifies criteria by registering for alerts. A user can register for an alert when an auction is placed either by specified vendor(s), or for specific course title(s), or in selected categories. The site also supports BidWatch – a tool which helps users to monitor the bids in an auction, and AutoBid – an online tool for making automatic bids based on user-specified bidding rules.
A separate interface is provided for the vendors to place new auctions, modify existing auctions, manage their product catalog and add new course titles. The site also provides an easy-to-use administrative interface for site administrators to manage the users, schedule auctions and to change the business rules used by the auction engine. A reporting module is also implemented to provide several reports on auction activities to the vendors and site administrators.
The following diagram gives a brief overview of the n-tier architecture used in implementing site :
Technology
The site uses the Java version of MarketServer, an integrated framework developed by Calsoft for e-marketplaces and procurement solutions. The auction engine is built using J2EE technologies – Enterprise Java Beans, Servlets, Java Server Pages etc., The auction engine is deployed with IBM WebSphere as the Application Server and IBM Http Server as the web server. The business logic of the auction engine is built into Session Beans and the data is encapsulated using Entity Beans. Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition is used as the database server.