Website Link:
Entry Site: https://grcf.jhmi.edu/core-store/
Protected Core Store: https://jhucorestore.com/
The Core Store is a division of the Genetic Resources Core Facility of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In operation since 1989, the Core Store is a non-profit resource that offers appreciable savings and fast delivery of a wide variety of research products. The Core Store provides one-stop shopping, saving researchers both time and money. In addition to its product offering, the store charges no shipping and handling fees and has free delivery to three JHU campuses.
Project Summary
While working for Smart Solutions, I designed and helped develop a new ecommerce store for the JH Core Store.
The Core Store is a private system, accessible only to the main campus buildings and the researchers who work within those buildings. As an example, a researcher may need to purchase certain chemicals, antibody mixes or other kinds of equipment for them to perform their day to day duties, and will procure all their necessary tools from the core store and have them delivered directly to their rooms.
The Core Store has a rather large SKU count approaching 1 million unique items, supporting products from around 14 different supplying vendors, and as such does not stock the majority of items sold. Additionally, a great number of those SKU’s are types of items with a very short shelf life such as various antibodies. Due to this, as orders come in, they then create orders for the exact items needed from their vendors, and upon receipt of the order they then deliver to the original ordering researcher.
The Core Store receives a very large number of orders daily, and in order to manage the large volume ensuring high quality automation is a necessity. Everything from creating and tracking purchase orders for the vendors through to final shipment processes and signature collections upon delivery. A large number of ERP custom development was done as part of this project.
The system included custom development of an ERP style business management system, embedded into the admin of the Magento architecture.
The core Magento system handles all common ecommerce features such as:
- Single Sign On protection: accessible only to people with an official JH ID and credentials, such as researchers who work in any one of the main campus buildings.
- Standard customer purchasing flows
- Advanced product searching capabilities, to help find the precise item (nearly 1 million sku’s)
- Order tracking systems
- Advanced unique payment systems
- and other common Ecommerce features
This ERP system handles tasks such as:
- Complete vendor purchasing System
For identifying which products need to be purchased from vendors, making purchase orders for each vendor, tracking incoming deliveries from vendors, tracking vendor pricing and profitibility, and much more. - Custom Payment/Financial Systems
Unlike most ecommerce systems, the users of the core store are researchers purchasing products to work on projects which they may have grants for, and often orders are specifically related to grants. As such multiple special payment and financial tracking, acceptance and reporting systems were created to help track specific break downs of orders across multiple grants or accounts. - Complete Custom Delivery System
With thousands of orders being made, the ERP system was designed to monitor incoming deliveries from vendors, know which orders those deliveries were for, automatically create packing slips with barcode tracking for picking/packing/delivery, and integration within delivery recording systems (qtrak) for understanding who accepted deliveries, documenting and storing records of acceptance and more. - Advanced Automation
In all areas of the system, advanced automation needs were focused on, to ensure staff time was handled as efficiently as possible. A few examples include: Automatically knowing which precise products needed to be ordered each day, creating ordering slips for each of the vendors. Automatically knowing which orders could be delivered to customers due to receiving products from vendors, and understanding which customers received parts of their orders before other customers, automatically creating entire delivery lists, packing slips, order records and more with single clicks. Automated support for handling pricing and product sku lists from the various vendors, each of which are distinct and may provide pricing updates in different manners, for large quantities of SKU’s (nearly 1 million). And many other types of automations.
Services Provided
- BA/SA: All standard business analyst-related skills were utilized throughout the few years I worked with this client. Helping design the applications from the ground up, integrations, gathering requirements, wireframe development of all interfaces, UI/UX design, and more were done across the entire project base. Every interface in the system was designed by me.
- QA/Testing & Related: Being the only system that controls the entire business process, even short downtime can result in bringing the business to a halt, as staff would be unable to access the various documentation, perform checks, accept or move clients forward, customers would be unable to make orders, receipt of vendor products or deliveries would be unable to be carried forward or anything else. As such any changes, updates, security patches, enhancements, deployments and related need to be done and tested carefully to ensure site stability and that perfect functionality remained. Even short downtime would result in large organizational impacts. As such all topics related to QA were of high importance for these projects.
- Secondary PM: Due to the highly complex nature of the project, I performed all technical related PM-based responsibilities for this project, and worked together with the primary PM who handled less technical topics such as billing, reports, meetings scheduling, and all related services. As a large highly complex set of projects, this client required every standard PM-related support service over the couple years I worked with them.
- Dev PM: All standard development PM related responsibilities, such as scheduling development, working with the programmers, handling sprints, communicating requirements and more were handled by me throughout the entire project development cycles.