Allied Beverage Group’s
“eBiz” site, built with PHP
By Alan Seiden, PHP/i specialist
IBM i-hosted site provides rich functionality for wine distributor
In April 2009, COMMON awarded the Power Systems
Innovation Award for best Web Solution to Allied Beverage
Group, the largest wine and spirits distributor in New Jersey,
for their e-commerce site, “Allied eBiz.”
I am pleased to have been the lead developer for eBiz,
working with my colleagues at Strategic Business Systems,
Inc. (Strategic), and Allied’s IT staff. Strategic is Allied’s
longtime IBM business partner, based in Ramsey, N.J.,
specializing in “i” technologies, including PHP, RPG, and
electronic document management.
We designed “Allied eBiz” to run fully on the IBM i.
Accordingly, we chose technologies designed to work well
together on the ‘i’: PHP, Zend Framework, Zend Platform, and
db2. In addition, we adapted several of Allied’s RPG programs
that contained valuable business logic.
Allied’s sales representatives and customers now have access
to a large and growing set of features, including order entry,
live pricing and inventory, corporate announcements, and a
full-text search of Allied’s product catalog (Figure 1).
The requirement
The need for eBiz came from the challenges of the wine and
spirits business.
New Jersey’s wine and spirits distributors often sell similar
products. Therefore, the winning distributor must offer the
best expertise, information, and speed.
Figure 1: Results of full-text search for “chard napa 375ml”
Allied’s IBM i did contain
valuable data, but because
this information was
relatively inaccessible, it
was not a competitive
advantage for Allied’s sales
reps. They often had to
call the customer service
department or product
managers for the information they needed.
Reps did have limited self-service options—an automated
telephone system and a 5250-based system—but these were
cumbersome. Customers had no self-service system at all.
Allied’s executives saw the need for a system that would be
web-based, accessible to sales reps who travelled around the
state, and attractive to customers.
The solution
eBiz’s success is largely due to these popular features:
• Full-text product search (“Google style”) that enables
users to find products based on attributes such as
description, brand, size, and region of grape, no matter
where in the database these attributes are stored.
Example: a user can enter “chard napa 375ml” to get a list
of 375ml-sized chardonnays from the Napa Valley.
• Product pages that show bottle and label photos,
inventory levels, supplier name, packaging, pricing, retail
incentives (customers want to know this), other attributes
(kosher, organic), and the type of cork or packaging.
• “Expert” order entry mode that lets
experienced sales reps
work at high speed, even with the
unpredictable wireless connections
found on the road.
• Up-to-the-minute inventory levels,
incoming shipments, and records of
previous orders, allowing reps to
advise customers accurately.
• Real-time inventory adjustments when
an order is placed.
• Round-the-clock system availability.
• A dynamic home page for each user
that shows his or her orders that are in
process, reducing the risk of duplicate
or erroneous orders, saving time and
money.
