Project Title: Media production automation system for the world’s largest furniture manufacturer

The Challenge

The customer is a privately-held, international home products retailer that sells low-price products, including furniture, accessories, bathrooms and kitchens at retail stores around the world. It became famous for the fact that the consumers may assemble many of the products by themselves and thus save some costs.

The company distributes its products through its retail outlets. The chain consists of more than 250 stores all over the world, most of them in Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia and Australia. The Company’s Website contains about 12,000 products. In 2005 the Company reported over 275 million visitors to their websites.

The Solution

The system implements a set of workflows to secure business processes of the provision of graphical materials for use on the web, in printed media or as guideline images and is capable of communicating with other systems. Image handling workflow provides functionality for ordering of original images or for retouch of exisiting images. The main steps of the process are: Specify, Plan, Model, Create, Approve, Deliver.

The process is cyclic and contains only one step – "Monitor products relevance", on which the products may go through the statuses of relevance many times depending on their modification in external systems.

The system supports specific user roles responsible for managing appropriate tasks within workflows. The following functional roles types are supported: Administrator of a workflow, Workflow supervisor of a workflow, single role responsible for each workflow step.

The system provides adequate level of security as follows: it allows users to use Windows integrated authentication method when they logon to the system. Any user is allowed to access the system functions within the scope of role or roles assigned. Also the system allows user having appropriate role assigned to manage system settings and helper system information such as various classifiers, and provides search functionality allowing users to search orders on various criteria, including order type, creation date, and specific text within order comments.

Tools and Technologies

MS Windows Workflow Foundation is used for implementing the system’s workflow. User interface is implemented with use of AJAX technology and based on MS ASP.NET.

System consists of the following modules: Portal, Workflow and Data Access, Client, Data.

Oracle 10.2.0.1 for AIX5 is used as system’s database server.

MS Internet Information Services 6.0 is used as system’s Web server. The system implements Web based user interface providing support for Web browsers as follows:

1. Apple Safari 2.0-3.0
2. MS Internet Explorer 6.0-7.0
3. Mozilla Firefox 2.0

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