Product Information Management Software for a College Search Website

About Our Client

The Client is a company that provides a centralized database of US college profiles, admission details, scholarships, etc. It helps bringing students and colleges together, so that students could compare college offerings and find the most suitable options for them.

Challenge

The Client didn’t have a centralized system for storing and managing data about colleges. The company received college data from colleges in various formats and processed it in Excel to unify before uploading to the database. So, the Client wanted a product information management solution that would support data export from external sources and import of file formats compatible with Excel, such as .csv and .xlsx. A large data storage, flexibility for integrating with third-party software, and automated reporting were also required. The solution was to handle the load of at least 100 concurrent users.

Solution

After carefully analyzing the Client’s needs, ScienceSoft’s team started implementing a product information management (PIM) solution in the cloud. Our team deployed the PIM solution in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The project took 3 months. Our team started the work with implementing a data model that supported storing entities with an overall number of attributes of around 1,000. This was needed to allow the PIM solution to store large amounts of data.

To fulfill the Client’s requirement on the solution’s ability to handle the load of 100 concurrent users, ScienceSoft’s specialists carried out testing of the solution under load and decided on its optimal configuration based on the testing results.

Besides, our team enabled the PIM solution to support data exchange in Excel-supported file formats and automated reporting on the collected college data. Also, the team made possible the integration of the PIM solution with third-party software like catalog or content management solutions by using RESTful API.

Results

The product information management solution deployed in AWS enabled the Client to arrange the centralized storing and effective managing of college data received from many sources and in various formats. The PIM solution is integration-friendly and is aligned with the Client’s storage and load requirements.

Technologies and Tools

Linux, Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Docker, PHPUnit, git.