Koen-Levy Book Distributors
Company Profile
Koen-Levy Book Distributors is a full-service book distributor located in Moorestown, New Jersey. Koen needed a company to develop an application that would integrate with their existing inventory management and ordering system. One of our specialties, over the years, has been helping businesses integrate with existing legacy applications, which ultimately helps them save a significant amount of money year in and year out.
Challenge
Koen-Levy Book Distributors handles hundreds of publishers and hundreds of thousands of titles. They have four warehouses, and the company prides itself on being able to provide personal, fast and efficient service to all of its customers.
Before working with us, Koen-Levy required a fulltime staff to handle all of the requests for stock status, and customers were required to use a text-based system for ordering books. Of course, this required that the customers had to go through extensive training on how to use the system.
Solution
We developed a web-based interface to their existing technologies, which allows customers to perform stock-status queries online in real-time, thereby eliminating the need for customers to call Koen-Levy for stock-status. So right away, you can see how much time this saves Koen-Levy. In fact, they have been able to reduce their customer service department dramatically. For the customers too, the system we implemented makes ordering so much easier and quicker.
In addition to the stock-status application, which required developing communication between the legacy inventory system and the web-based ordering system, we created an e-commerce interface to their ordering system that eliminated the need to train customers on how to use their ordering process.
Some of the technologies we used in developing this solution include:
- NET for the web interface
- Microsoft SQL server for data storage
- TCPIP for communicating with their existing systems
- XML for describing messages between each system
