Background

Exponet is one of the largest exhibition services providers in Australia. It’s supported the exhibitions and events industry since 1980 with its large range of exhibition equipment. With several warehouses across Australia, it supports more than 400 events conducted in 100 venues nationwide annually. Exponet has provided world-class event and exhibition solutions for an incredibly diverse range of clients and has been consistently recognized for excellence by industry associations such as Meetings and Events Australia and the Exhibition and Event Association of Australasia.

Challenge

Exponet had used a legacy back office system for inventory management, warehousing, and tracking client reservations. This system was developed as a VPN connection-based system in FoxPro and was mainly used for:

• Controlling the inventory and logistics of about 1,500 items.
• Tracking the transfer of items between warehouses and event locations.
• Blocking items in stock for a show based on customer orders.
• Tracking orders from quote to invoice.
• Preventing overbooking of stock items.
• Tracking event schedules.

Exponet wanted to re-engineer the system to a web-based application, using more up-to-date technology and newer software development processes. It also wanted to add functionalities and new steps to its existing processes.

Solution

Our business consultants and technology leads conducted a detailed study of the client’s requirements and the business’s present system, and then proposed the most suitable solution. A core team of .NET consultants went onsite to the client location in Sydney during the knowledge transfer phase to study the existing application and was involved from the inception of the project. Though the old application served the client for almost 20 years, it needed a revamp due to the now-obsolete technology used. Our IT team took into consideration the modern trends in the industry while designing the application. We designed a loosely coupled, scalable web-based architecture for the new system. The application was developed in the Microsoft ASP.NET platform and .NET Framework 3.5. Some of the new features of the application are:

• Multiple navigation options for users.
• Search functionality to produce detailed results and allow custom searches, increasing efficiency when taking and updating orders.
• New modules for the Point of Sale system, taking into account the new processes.

Benefits

Even though the new application was based on the original legacy application, it was a total rewrite of the system. The entire business logic was reanalyzed and the application was rewritten from scratch using up-to-date software platforms and processes.

Some of the benefits the client has reported are:

• Improved look and feel and modularized layout.
• New features introduced for better user experience.
• Better search functionality.
• Auto Text feature.
• Customizable Dashboard.
• Faster page loading times.
• Cleaner and more intuitive navigation.
• Improved client and server caching.
• Ability to scale up and extend support to third-party applications.