Electrospec Inc. is an award winning full service electronic component distributor with an extensive, world-wide customer base in the fields of military/aerospace, industrial, automotive, computing and telecommunications.

One of the primary activities that Electrospec's staff had to go through on a daily basis, was browse through the inventories and online catalogs of dozens of manufacturers and distributors to find components. This was a slow and cumbersome process and they wanted to automate this as much as possible, thereby cutting down the time needed to source components requested by customers.

We developed a Web 2.0 based application that would go out to 50+ different websites, perform searches in parallel and in the background without user intervention and report results back within seconds. This was a complex application with the two main challenges being the ability to properly login to various sites and extract the right data, and to display results in an organized and formatted manner with outstanding performance. The result was that the staff was able to cut down the time to source components drastically. There were not only able to get results much faster but also did not have to analyze a lot of the information manually.

The main features of the application are:

• Web 2.0 based interface with extensive use of AJAX to perform all functions interactively.
• 50+ distributor and manufacturer websites available to search on with the ability to specify logins and define other criteria.
• Perform search in parallel on all sites while retaining user responsiveness.
• Monitoring tab/grid to monitor search in real time to show the status of the search on different websites.
• Classification of the search results into an easy to read and analyze grid.
• Display of part number details like manufacturer, supplier details, ratings and compliance, datasheet, availability and prices.
• Rate suppliers and add comments to evaluate suppliers and share those with other users in the organization.
• Send RFQs to suppliers with desired prices and terms.
• Save search results in PDF or Excel format for offline access.
• Instant filtering of results by various parameters.
• Easy sorting by clicking on column headers.

Screenshots