Client

The client is a major motor manufacturer, and needed a pilot eCommerce site for its European arm. The primary requirement was to allow a customer to configure and customise any vehicle within the company's range. In addition, the customer was to be offered insurance and warranty with their vehicle, and also a finance quote online, which would include the ability to specify a vehicle for part exchange. At a later stage, it was intended that the customer would be able to opt to buy the vehicle online, for delivery through the company's usual channels.

Charteris' Role

Charteris was responsible for business analysis and design of the complete system, including its integration into the rest of the company's IT systems.

Charteris provided a technical lead consultant and a team of around seven developers. We also complemented the client's own team with additional development resource as required.

Solution

The entire site was produced as a tiered development using Visual Basic components running within MTS or COM+ Component Services providing the business logic. ASP pages were used to interact with the components. All data was manipulated as XML documents, with XSL style sheets being used to render this as HTML/DHTML for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator 4+.

The team developed a common infrastructure for State Management within a Web Farm environment based around XML technologies, and a common solution to the CRM database synchronisation made use of MSMQ and IBM MQSeries.

The software and technologies used were as follows: Microsoft Tool Set, MS Visual Basic 6.0, MS Visual Interdev (HTML, ASP, VBScript and JavaScript), MS Internet Information Server, SQL Server 7.0, XML (MS XML Dom 2.0), XSL, MS Transaction Server 2.0 and COM+ Components Services, MS Message Queue, ADO 2.X, CDO, MS Windows NT4 later to migrated to Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Visual SourceSafe, Internet Explorer 4+, Netscape 4+, HomeSite, pcAnywhere, MS Terminal Services and IBM MQSeries. The team made extensive use of XML and XSL technologies so that data could be successfully separated from presentation, and XML was also used as a storage mechanism for object state, and session persistence.

To read more about Charteris’ Manufacturing offering, please visit the Manufacturing portal >