TandemSeven

The Challenge
Independence Tube Corporation, a leading manufacturer of square, rectangular and circular hollow structural tubing, released a custom portal solution that allows customers to view stock, submit inquiries and review invoice documents. While the portal functionally fulfills these goals, customers find it difficult to navigate the application—particularly when searching inventory. In addition, stock information and invoice documents are not retrieved in real-time. This results in lack of data integrity pertaining to inventory information as well as system-wide response degradation during data refreshes.

TandemSeven Solution
Independence Tube partnered with TandemSeven for a complete redesign of the existing custom portal solution. To identify requirements, TandemSeven and Independence Tube’s sales staff interviewed customers onsite. The interviews resulted in a user-centered design that features a facetted stock browser, allowing users to intuitively navigate through inventory items. The application also enables orders to be placed directly through the portal and submitted to an industry-specific enterprise resource planning platform. Next, TandemSeven designed a production rolling schedule framework that incorporates into the capacity planning workflow, and a Pricing Engine—which, until now, had been a manual and time consuming process. TandemSeven then teamed up with Independence Tube’s IT staff to create a technical architecture, and delivered a detailed technical design for all the subsystems in the portal solution. The collaboration ensured buy-in at the earliest stages of technical design, ensuring the feasibility of implementation.

Results
The new user design and detailed technical design is currently being used as a blueprint to create a more user-centered portal. Independence Tube is proceeding with the development of the portal solution and anticipates improved navigation, inventory data integrity and customer satisfaction.