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Case Study - SourceMat
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rading website for Vendors/Suppliers fo Helicopter spares and consumers acorss the United States - Built using PHP, MySQL and Google MAP technology.

The Client
Sourcemat was built on the principal that every company could use a helping hand. In an industry full of high costs and fast deadlines, material managers and maintenance supervisors are often called upon to resolve a seemingly impossible situation. To this point, traditional internet parts search databases have had limited success in obtaining parts and component maintenance, but often fell short in providing aircraft maintenance and true AOG contacts.

From years of experience, Sourcemat recognizes that parts and maintenance go hand in hand. Unfortunately one is useless without the other. Finding honest, dependable maintenance is often an uphill battle, if not completely forgone as impossible. Thus, busted trips, recovery aircraft, and sending your own maintenance personnel on an airline flight builds in even more costs and lost revenue. Sadly, this scenario seems to be the norm and it doesn't need to be. We are a community of individual, high-quality; talented companies built on the same principals. If we pull together to facilitate parts and maintenance with like-minded individuals who truly know what "AOG" means, the industry will not only reduce its costs, but will flourish in efficiency.

The Challenge
SourceMat wanted to provide a medium and a solution for Suppliers/Vendors of Helicopter spares and Consumers. Below are a list challenges on the site:

Summary of challenges:

• Allowing Suppliers/Vendors to manage, list their Product Catalog on the site. The main criteria is that these Suppliers/Vendors already have huge lists of Product Catalog in various formats including plan text files, excel spreadsheets, tab delimited, CSV, etc. We need to provide a robust and a easy way for them to upload their catalog to SourceMat’s database without much effort.
• Design out-of-the-box User Interface for Consumers to search for a particular Part or a Supplier/Vendor in a region. This can be through a Part number, Area Code, City.
• An efficient way to manage enquiries from Consumers to Suppliers/Vendors.

The Solution
Developing such an application of this size and the size of the data was a big challenge for us at Sand. The major part was suing the old database and re-designing the new system which is always a great challenge.

We formed two teams, where one team would re-architect the database and the other team to design the new User Interface. We started developing the site from scratch using a 3-tier MVC (Model View Controller)Architecture to increase scalability & maintainability. We also followed AGILE Development Methodology, BugZilla, SVN to execute the project in a more efficient way.

We had hiccups in the beta version stages due to the amount of information we need to show per page, Vendors uploading large spreadhseets. We had to react quickly to update the code, make some changes in the data being rendered to the UI and optimize code & queries. This helped us to stabilize the site to a great extent.

The BottomLine
SourceMat is now allowing Consumers to get handy information of Supplier/Vendors of Helicopter spares across the United States. Sending enquiries or getting in touch with Vendors is very easy which is helping both Consumers and Vendors in a great way. This concept until SourceMat was not available.

Sand understood that designing & developing a new concept into reality called for a departure from conventional web design methods and start thinking out-of-the-box. We’re proud that we were a part of this team. Client Experiences "Sand has shared our vision in creating the best solution for my dream project. We have grown to 50K hits in just a month after launching our site, thanks for the timely response from Sand and making the application such scalable. Working with the team has been like and extended team without the fear of loosing the vision of the idea."

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