The Client

Blaisten S.A. is the leading home improvement and construction materials specialty retailer in Argentina. Founded in 1928 in Buenos Aires, it has ever since grown to be the leader in its field, expanding to 10 branches in Buenos Aires and the surrounding areas. In 1997, the company was acquired by Chile’s retail giant Cencosud, which in turn holds retail operations in many Latin American countries, and has ownership over 15 retail brands.

Case study

Faced with complex, time-consuming price quotations for many distinct and specific items, quoted directly from the floor as the customer walked the store, costs, calculation stock and price estimates were usually a long, grueling task for sales people and customers as well. Blaisten was one of the first companies to apply what is now common practice in typical SFA (Sales Force Automation) applications, where live, simultaneous, access to different databases is needed. The client decided to develop a new sales process that would enable the sales people to sell directly from the sales floor.

The first application was developed in the mid-90's, had a time-sharing architecture, and had the following limitations, among others:

• Database, application development tool and Operating System (AIX), not supported by the manufacturer (SYMBOL).
• High cost of development and maintenance in order to adapt and modify the applications to the company's business model.
• Development tool limits the possibilities of migrating from PDA hardware and database platform, thus preventing from the use of newer technologies which in turn were more flexible and less expensive to implement.

Solution provided: Web-based application

• Development of the SFA module in web-based technology.
• Development and integration to the already installed Legacy System.

Applied technology

• Development: Microsoft Visual Studio, MS C#, MS ASP,MS .Net 2.0, MS Active Directory
• Database: Oracle