Calico Industries, Inc.
www,calicoindustries.com |
|
Calico Industries, Inc. provides food service equipment and supplies to
a broad range of institutional and governmental users.
Most orders are placed using a printed catalog.
In order to stay competitive and expand into international
markets, Calico Industries needed a web site that would portray
them in a way that was consistent with their reputation for
quality, service, and technical expertise.
Harbor Software, Inc.
designed and built an
e‑commerce web site that established Calico Industries
presence on the web and allowed customers to order any of the
items in the published catalog via the Internet.
|
|
(click on image to view full size)
|
One of the challenges that Harbor Software faced was how to move the
approximately 3000 items in the print catalog from a non-standard
desktop database format to a powerful SQL database on the web
server. This problem
was further complicated by the fact that the data was organized in
a five level hierarchy of sections, categories, groups,
sub-groups, and items.
The solution was to write a program to extract the data and
convert it to a suitable format for uploading to the web server
database. In
addition, the e‑commerce web site had to be custom designed
to maintain the five level organization required by the catalog
data. |
|
Because this was a
business-to-business e-commerce web site with a large number of
items, a powerful search capability was required. Harbor Software developed a search engine that allowed the
user to enter a variety of criteria and browse through all the
items that were selected. This
was further complicated by the fact that the search might find
entire levels, such as groups or sub-groups, not just items.
Future planned enhancements include displaying different items and
prices to large organizations that have contracts with Calico
Industries as well as linking to the corporate AS-400 to automate
the order entry process and provide up-to-date inventory
availability information on the web site.
|
(click on image to view full size)
|
|
|
