Ken deKlerk

In 2009, as one of the first projects with State of the Arts, the Safeway Floral Online Ordering system was a big one.  We were contracted to create a online ordering system for flowers within the larger system of Safeway. 

The process of online ordering before we started was to look at pictures and prices online then call the 1-800 number to order.  They wanted a completely automated ordering system with all the options online to reduce the number of calls to their call centre.  In the same time period they wanted to overhaul their call centre software.  The call centre project was on another team and ended up taking more time than I could afford to wait for.

There were a lot of design restraints as the project involved creating a webservice to connect to a main frame.  The web service was mainly handling the database and did very little business process.  If there had been more budget and freedom all the business decisions would be done on the web services in a more SOA model.  There were technical restrictions as nothing coud be installed on the server, the web service was in a different data centre (across the country) and so all data needed to be cached for as long as possible. All development would be done in .NET 2.0.

The team was a larger one as there was one team working on the call centre side in Vancouver, the database (web service implementation) was in Arizona, Safeway Canada HQ in Calgary and our team in Calgary.

I brought the code to the testing stage and the QA team and deployment team will be releasing the product soon.

• Team:
  • Local Team: 1 PM, 1 Manager, Designer, Developer
  • Remote Team: 4 Developers
  • Safeway Team: IS Manager, IT Team, Floral Managers, Marketing/Sales Team, Phone Team, Customer Service Managers
  • Call Centre Team: Large.
• Environment
  • Development: Visual Studio 2008 (.NET 2.0)
  • Server: Windows Server 2005
  • Database: Oracle
• Link:
  • Safeway Canada - www.safeway.ca

 Before:

After: