MVP of a Purchase Order Management SaaS Product Ready in 4 Months

Customer

The Customer is a global provider of supply chain management services and software products. It is among America’s fastest-growing private companies according to the Inc. 5000.

Need for Efficient Purchase Order Management

One of the services the Customer provides is purchase order management. The Customer orders manufacturing parts for its clients, tracks their shipment, and ensures the orders are executed correctly. To manage orders, the Customer used to rely on Excel spreadsheets and emails, which was time-consuming and impaired transparency between parties involved in supply chains.

To make the process more efficient and transparent, the Customer wanted to build a purchase order management (POM) SaaS product with customer-supplier communication capabilities. The software was intended for the Customer’s internal use and subscription-based distribution among its clients. The Customer decided to first develop an MVP as a reliable foundation for further software evolution.

As the Customer earlier involved ScienceSoft for its BI solution and SCM portal architecture development and was satisfied with the outcomes, it contacted us again.

Developing a Scalable Purchase Order Management MVP

ScienceSoft appointed a team of a project manager, a business analyst, a solution architect, a .NET developer, an Angular developer, a DevOps engineer, and a QA engineer to the project.

The new POM system was to become one of the tools available via the Customer’s SCM portal. As our team had already designed the SCM portal’s microservices-based architecture with the requirements for the future POM product in mind, the discovery and design stages for this project were significantly shortened. The flexible architecture of the portal also meant that we could reuse the initial microservices code for new software modules, including POM, thus optimizing development efforts and costs.

To deliver the purchase order management product MVP, our team created a new POM microservice and connected it to the existing microservices via Azure Service Bus. The MVP has the following capabilities:

• Role-based user access management

Clients can configure Admin or User roles for their employees at both portal and company levels. If a user works for multiple companies and holds various positions, the system generates a token containing specific permissions relevant to the corresponding role.

• Purchase order placement

For its internal operations, the Customer uploads purchase orders from its data warehouse to the POM tool. All the order details are automatically reflected in the corresponding table fields within the tool’s UI (e.g., PO number, item quantity). To provide the same convenience for external users and avoid manual data input, the Customer plans to develop an API so that its clients can upload purchase orders from their internal systems.

• Purchase order attributes adjustment and PO execution tracking

Companies and suppliers can update purchase order attributes. For instance, a supplier can confirm or change the due date suggested by a customer. Customers can track all the required details, including parts quantity, prices, delivery date, delay reasons, etc.

• Documents exchange

Users can browse, upload, and download purchase order files. These files are stored within Azure Blob Storage, while essential metadata, such as file name, owner, and date, is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The document indexer plays a key role in keeping this metadata up to date.

• Customer-supplier communication

Users can leave comments on purchase orders, attach files and reply to comments, tag other users, and access comment threads.  This functionality relies on Azure CosmosDB, enabling resilient storage for the constantly growing data volumes.

• Information search

Thanks to the search service based on Azure Cognitive Search, users can search for info across activities, entities, and comment threads related to their purchase orders. This service enables data indexing and supports fuzzy search, filters, and autocomplete suggestions. The search returns the results relevant only to active purchase orders to enable convenient PO navigation without outdated data entries.

After the POM tool MVP was delivered, ScienceSoft’s team provided detailed product launch and evolution instructions for the Customer’s in-house team.

Flexible POM System MVP Ready in 4 Months

Within just four months, the Customer received an MVP of its SaaS purchase order management product. The Customer will now involve its in-house development team to launch and gradually evolve the MVP. Thanks to ScienceSoft’s proactive approach during the previous collaboration stage, it was possible to reuse microservices-based components to speed up MVP development and optimize development costs.

The Customer plans to upgrade the product with a notification service, sub-suppliers management functionality, and data analytics capabilities. The upgrades will be easy to perform due to the future-proof software architecture delivered by ScienceSoft. As of October 2023, our business analyst is staying with the Customer to assist with short- and long-term product evolution planning.

Technologies and Tools

Azure, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Cognitive Search, .NET, ASP.NET, Angular.