We were approached by an American defence company, that provides scientific, engineering, systems integration, and technical services. The company works extensively with the United States Department of Defense – including the National Security Agency – as well as other US government civil agencies and selected commercial markets.

the brief

The organisation maintains a procurement platform that helps their high profile clients to manage the purchase of hardware; this existing setup was originally built in Lotus Notes/Domino.

Following an invitation to tender, Oval was successful in securing the contract to upgrade the system. These improvements were required in order to exploit the latest web technologies (eg responsive design, a search function which connects to the Google shopping API, partial page reloading etc) to create an enriched user experience.

the solution

As well as overhauling the design of the main user interface, we moved the system away from ‘classic Domino’ to make the most of IBM’s XPages technology, and implemented a super fast faceted search facility using Solr.

There were a number of challenges to overcome as the project progressed, including ensuring that we devised a simple design that functions reliably across all browsers. We’ve also separated design, data and business logic, making the system easy to maintain, and simpler to upgrade in the future.

The company’s clients are now greeted with a crisp interface which enables them to quickly and easily locate the item(s) that they require, generate purchase orders (or request quotes), before adding items to their cart for processing.

We even took a trip out to the US to help with the technical handover (and to sample the sights of New York)!

Tags: software development