ASAP Software updates online ordering with FRI’s OrderChannel

Fioravanti-Redwood International (FRI, 847.673.5650, www.frinc.com) announced that HP 3000 customer ASAP Software Express, one of the world’s leading resellers of PC software, add-on hardware and services, has gone live with ASAP E-Way. FRI’s OrderChannel 5.02 was used to build E-Way’s online ordering component, eBuy.

E-Way is an extranet that lets end users order, manage, and track technology, including software licenses, shrink-wrap, add-on hardware and technical services, from a single application. ASAP E-Way is part of the organization’s strategy to provide a complete e-business solution to its corporate and government customers.

Using online license procurement, authorized affiliates are able to use ASAP E-Way to check contract pricing, place and track orders and run activity reports on their purchases no matter where the affiliates are in the world. By using the parent company’s global agreement, rather than signing their own local contract, the affiliates are able to realize much larger volume discounts.

Customers using eBuy can quickly access contract pricing, as well as track orders. Using the newest features of OrderChannel, the eBuy application automates numerous management and administration features, including setting user purchasing limits and order approval routing. This allows companies to authorize spending limits throughout the organization, instead of requiring every single order to go through central purchasing. For maximum ease in order processing, customers have numerous searching and ordering options.

“As part of the development of our next generation e-business solution, we wanted to build a comprehensive Internet order management system,” said Bob Lewandowski, vice president of systems of ASAP Software. “OrderChannel gave us a key component for the application. The direct link to our back-end HP 3000 system allows us to increase efficiencies and lower transaction costs, which in turn helps us to remain competitive.”

The eBuy component resides on a HP NetServer running Windows NT and the IIS Web server. eBuy also uses Microsoft’s SQL Server database as its repository. The software accesses data in ASAP’s custom-built order management application, which resides on an HP 3000 using IMAGE/SQL. OrderChannel’s built-in application programming interfaces (APIs) handle the links to the 3000 applications.