Fabric Procurement Application

The Customer

The client is one of UK's leading retailers of clothing, foods, home ware and financial services, serving 10 million customers a week in over 300 UK stores. The Company also trades in 30 countries worldwide, and has a group turnover in excess of £8 billion.

The Business Challenge

The web site (portal) was developed for the Fabric workstream, which is part of the GMSS workstream. The overall aim of the GMSS workstream is to increase the efficiency of the supply chain and improve ‘speed to market’. The portal will present the M&S business users the analysis through reports of fabric and fabric supplier information relating to procurement process. Garment Suppliers will be able to record fabric and supplier information through the portal.

The Solution

• The system was developed as a web-based application hosted on IIS 5.0 on windows 2000 server and will have three-tier architecture.
• The front end will be developed using HTML, ASP and JavaScript and Office Web Components (OWC 10). (The browser will be IE 5.5 and above.)
• The middle tier will consist of components developed in VB 6.0 hosted in COM+ environment.
• The backend will be MS SQL 2000 and OLAP server that will hold the data and run cubes.