National Distributing Company
Case Study: Web Enabled Sales Ordering System
 National Distributing Company (NDC) is one of the largest wholesale vendors of alcohol beverages in the United States. The company distributes wine, spirits, and beer to all corners of the nation.
In order to service the vast database needs of their company, customers, and suppliers, NDC required a powerful sales ordering system. Instead of using a generalized off-the-shelf solution, they decided to develop a custom-tailored system of their own.
Mobile salespeople would require remote access to product information and would need to add customer information to a database.
NDC envisioned a portable handheld device that would allow information to be added, viewed, changed, and stored within a contained unit for standalone access. This required a high-performance database engine with a small disk/memory footprint.
In addition to the handheld database system, a larger client/server database system would also be needed. Information gathered on the PDA's would be synchronized with this central database server at a later time. Normally, two separate applications would need to be developed, one for the PDA-based database, and another for the client/server database system. But because of CodeBase's scalability, the handheld database system could be scaled up to the client/server database easily, saving much development time and money.
Also, CodeBase's multi-platform support gives the developers a greater choice of operating systems to develop for, such as Windows, Unix, or Linux.
NDC ultimately selected Sequiter Software's award-winning CodeBase Database Development Tools, for having met or exceeded all of their requirements.
The final result is the Web Enabled Sales Ordering System which consists of the following:
Handheld Database System |
Standalone configuration running on handheld PDA for mobile data access |
- Web browser front-end served by the Linux-based Apache web server
- CodeBase database server
- Windows CE platform
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Client/Server Database System |
Client/Server system consisting of a central database server |
- Web browser front-end served by Microsoft IIS
- CodeBase database engine
- Windows platform
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Advantages of using CodeBase with this system include:
- high-performance handling of terabytes of information that needs to be stored, retrieved, or queried
- small disk/memory footprint allowing the system to run on a handheld PDA
- scalability and portability of the handheld system to the client/server
- capability of supporting 1000's of users client/server configurations in addition to standalone access
CodeBase Software is proud to be NDC's database application development tool of choice and is confident in providing quality products and services, backed by outstanding technical support for all of our current and future customers.
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