B Sails – Online Quoting System

B Sails S.r.l. redesigned its online quotation system, which we developed back in 2018 and which supported the company very well during the covid period.

Customer Management and CRM

• Multi-tenant system with full management of client company master data and accounts
• Automatic quotation management and follow-up email sending
• Reserved area for client companies with summary and management of quotes/orders and invoicing documents
• Generation of order and quote documents in PDF
• ACL system with management of roles and permissions to regulate access to functions in a precise and granular manner

Configurable quotation system through rules and entities

The new online B2B quotation system, thanks to the analysis of the shortcomings that emerged during the period of use of the previous system, has been equipped with an advanced rule system to guide the buyer in the selection of options, linked to which we have developed a new tariff management system that has undergone a heavy work of streamlining and simplification to reduce the various production steps to a few small percentage or per square meter variations in order to manage cost fluctuations as the size of the products ordered increases.

Production Management and Certain Dates

In this new version of the software, production management via a web calendar has been introduced. The development allows operators to organise their work according to the production margins of the rolling system. In addition, we have normalised the company’s production data by creating indices that allow us to estimate the company’s production capacity, making the ordering system able to calculate free production slots and let the customer choose the delivery date.

Digital production process

In the development we also decided to completely overhaul the configuration section of the sail production process, to allow the customer to be able to change the rules governing the production process in total autonomy.

Stack used

• Laravel (backend PHP)
• Livewire (Dynamic UI)
• Tailwind (CSS)
• Alpine (JS)
• PestPHP (Test)
• PhpStan (Static Analysis)
• PHP CS Fixer (Code Style)

CI/CD system

In order to simplify and accelerate the development cycle of the platform, a pipeline of Continuous Integration (frequent and automatic integration of changes to the source code) and Continuous Deployment (rapid and downtime-free delivery of the updated code to the production system) has been set up.
Each phase is subject to a preliminary check of the formal and functional correctness of the source code, in order to detect any bugs and/or weak points in the code as soon as possible.

Docker Containerization

The code is organised on a container architecture, where each functional area of the architecture is maintained within its own container. This allows both the processes isolation and their execution to be abstracted from the server infrastructure on which they run, making it easy to replicate the system for development, testing and debugging purposes. The entire cycle of container creation, code updating and management is managed through a proprietary system that simplifies and automates container operations.