The Client

The client is a leading manufacturer of steel ingots in India. The client’s steel making facility consists of coreless induction furnaces. It has been making steel using sponge iron as feedstock and has been operating at more than 100% of its rated capacity. The steel produced is cast into ingots.

The Project

The steel ingots manufactured by the client are sold to other business units and consumers only through middlemen, who absorb a substantial part of the profit margin in this business. As the business dealings were not open and transparent, it lead to a great deal of lost opportunity for both the manufacturer and the seller.

To address the problem the client ventured into developing an eBusiness site - a steel commodity exchange, envisaging fair and transparent business dealing among the producers, consumers and suppliers in the steel industry.

On the basis of our portal development expertise, the client invited Quintegra to study the scope of this new venture and to develop the web site such that it addresses the commercial and technical aspects, and a phased implementation of the complete system.

Collaborating with the client on its eBusiness venture, Quintegra developed a solution with a 3-tire-architecture. The presentation layer comprised of HTML and JSP pages. Most of the business logic was handled using Servlets. The application was hosted on IPlanet Application Server.

The application developed contained the following modules:

	User registration and data maintenance (for issuing user ID and password to the registered users; maintaining steel demand and supply details; and generating graphical reports with the available data)
	Capital equipment (storage and presentation of capital equipment data in a logical format)
	Trading (purchase order generation and dispatch details maintenance)
	Imports & exports and foreign suppliers (harbor-wise presentation of import and export data maintained by the C&F; agents and transporters data; maintenance of foreign supplier steel data; purchase order generation and dispatch details maintenance)

Value Created

	The majority of all sales transactions happens on the portal, leading to reduced operating costs
	The solution lead to better collaboration and communication between manufacturers, vendors and consumers
	The client was able to streamline and enhance its sales process, leading to increased profits
	The time to add new vendors and consumers in the sales process was reduced
	The portal resulted in reduced abandonment rate among new consumers
	The portal provided the ability to track, segment and reward repeat consumers
	The solution added the ability to scale technology with operational requirements