B2B Health

The client

Nutrient Network (www.nutrientnetwork.com) is a B2B portal that provides nutri—ceutical raw material to the world market with its e-commerce system. The company has created an online community of manufacturers, exporters, importers, vendors, testing companies, researchers and value-added suppliers in the field of
nutriceuticals.

The challenge

Nutrient needed an e-commerce solution to process high-volume transactions among six types of partners: Elite Manufacturer Program (EMP), Premier Vendor Program (PVP), Value-Added Suppliers (VAS), Testing Laboratories, International Nutriceutical Distribution Network (INDN), Research and Development (R&D) companies, and Value-Added Service Providers (VAS). The efficiency and operability of the e-commerce platform was central to Nutrient Network’s business mission. So, the solution was required to ensure:

n Complete transparency among all parties

n Nutrient’s accountability for all transactions on the portal

n Economic efficiency based on 24x7 business hours

To meet these objectives, the solution required an e-commerce architecture with high-volume capability. Nutrient required a scalable and robust solution using a technology and platform, which had a proven record of successful deployments.

The solution

ICICI Infotech’s (www.icici-infotech.com) solution was a combination of onsite and offshore development resources. An ICICI coordinator was stationed onsite and served as a direct communication link between the client and the offshore team. The offshore team in India was deployed to develop the portal. The portal was divided into modules, each developed by a dedicated team. In addition, an independent quality assurance team was deployed to ensure that the solution adhered to international and client standards.

To create the application, the team used the object-oriented analysis and design approach. The functionality of the application was broken into business objects, which were encapsulated in Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). The EJB technology was used to address the need for saving state across different screens at the client end, in order to transfer data to a persistent state.

ICICI Infotech defined a multi-tiered and multi-layered architecture based on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The architecture consisted of disparate technologies such as Java, EJB, JSP and XML. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was used for capturing the design of the components and objects. The team used the WebLogic server for handling high transaction volumes.

Besides transactions-related features, the portal includes features such as sale, purchase, accounting and inventory management, and an online library.

The advantage

ICICI Infotech helped Nutrient Network evolve its web infrastructure, thereby providing its vendors, buyers and distributors a safe and robust 24x7 transactional environment for the nutriceutical industry.