SciQuest Case Study

Background

Scientific research laboratories are the breeding grounds of innovation. Many of the great advances achieved throughout history would have been unthinkable without proper tools for study and speculation. But finding such tools typically requires laboratory procurement staff to browse through hundreds of dense catalogs from a seemingly endless list of suppliers. Now, SciQuest.com, Inc., based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, has developed an e-commerce Web site that makes it easy for researchers to find and purchase the equipment they need, from rubber gloves to microscopes. Before opening its on-line store, SciQuest.com conducted some thorough research. The company first launched an informational Web site and product-sourcing service in 1995, based on a powerful search engine and an on-line database. The venture strengthened the companyÕs understanding of its market. However, SciQuest.comÕs founders had a much broader vision of what their web site could become. As former sales professionals for Baxter Scientific Products, they were well aware of the frustrations experienced by scientists and researchers when purchasing laboratory supplies. They also understood the myriad problems associated with selling supplies. ÒIndustry analysts estimate that internet procurement automation like SciQuest.comÕs could reduce requisition-processing costs by 70% per order, from $107 per manual order to $30 per automated order,Ó notes Rob Fusillo, Chief Information Officer at SciQuest.com.

Problem

SciQuest had successfully built their general public e-commerce web-site, but their larger customers desired more customized interfaces for their purchasing needs. Complicating this effort was the fact that many of the larger customers had negotiated different prices than what SciQuest published on it public web site. The challenge was to quickly develop private purchasing systems for them which only incorporated the products and prices that a particular customer had already negotiated with its suppliers.

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Solution

SciQuest turned to Shared Vision Group to help architect and develop the solution. Within a monthÕs time Shared Vision Group had delivered the first private purchasing system for SciQuest and its largest customer. Realizing the potential demand by other corporations for a similar system, SciQuest needed to automate the process of creating private purchasing sites. Again SciQuest turned to Shared Vision Group to come up with an automated way of creating the private purchasing sites without involving a large team of developers when a new one was required.

Results and Benifits

Shared Vision Group consultants and SciQuest developers created a replication engine that can produce a new private purchasing site in under two hours through a series of applications. SciQuest is uniquely positioned in the marketplace to tempt their more lucrative customers with this cutting edge solution and has a differentiator of which their competition can only dream.