Online Tender Tool for AMEX

The Project

AMEX is an Austrian company that distributes medical and laboratory equipment, devices and consumables. They needed an online tool to manage large and small tenders as the company supports worldwide crisis centers at war zones, health and humanitarian organizations and such that directly or indirectly benefit from the use of medical equipment and tools. The software solution would come handy as AMEX also manages all means of transportation of the equipment via air, sea and land.

The development of the online tool was deployed in just over a year in January, 2019. The Melon team varied, at the peak having 5 dedicated developers, including back-end, front-end, a UI/UX designer, a project manager and for the final phase – a DevOps engineer. 

Development didn’t start from scratch. The client already had a proprietary license tool that didn’t meet all needs and criteria. The big task was working around the existing software and introducing many new features. 

Challenges 

After 8 months of work, it became clear that the legacy system is no longer sustainable and needed to be upgraded to the next version. including the Angular version – a significant effort. It turned out to be the first challenge that required a month of development, minding more than 30 sets of custom-built features.

One of the most challenging tasks for our software development team was to achieve the user experience and functionality similar to that of Microsoft Excel, but in a web-based application tailored to the client’s custom approach.

As well as managing big dataset entries related to items, suppliers, transportation and financial data in a user-friendly manner, and our team had to automatically identify the best suited suppliers for items required in the tender documentation.

Results

We built a module offering precise information about all possible transportation via air, sea and land, often at war zones, and at the same time monitoring the cost effectiveness of the chosen means and routes. Our developers had no experience with such details of shipment of containers with medical and laboratory goods, so it was both thrilling and challenging. It took several meetings with the client and trying different approaches to understand the high-level business case and then to translate it into code architecture and database structure.

Our software developers delivered a powerful online tool that introduced a tremendous amount of improvement to the client’s work process. It features an Excel-like environment with fully automated calculations including notifications and warnings. Most importantly, it minimizes human errors.