Igility brings B2G Commerce to Henry Schein / North American Rescue

Intro

North American Rescue (NAR), recently acquired by Henry Schein, had an immediate need for a secure e-commerce platform to serve its customers in the federal government. After evaluating and rejecting other turnkey solutions, NAR turned to Igility. The goal was to provide a custom, highly secure Business-To-Government (B2G) e-commerce portal within 180 days.
Igility leveraged Drupal and Drupal Commerce to quickly craft a solution supporting key features including:

• team-oriented purchasing workflows.
• medical licensure requirements for select products.
• custom integration with NAR’s back-end ERP systems.

Serving about 50% of the world’s governments, Drupal is well known for flexibility as well as security and in this project we pushed it to the limit.

The result? For 10% of the cost of a competitive SAP Hybris B2B deployment, we were able to design and build a secure solution that met NAR’s unique requirements and roll out to their customers in 180 days from brand strategy through design, build, testing, and deployment.

Finally, when NAR needed us to step in to take over its Magento website for its B2C business, Igility was ready to revamp NAR’s devops, boost site security and build custom features to meet the needs of NAR’s diverse customers in business and government.

Who is North American Rescue?

North American Rescue is a company founded, built and run by medics for medics in the military, government agencies and emergency rescue organizations around the globe. Their mission is to provide tailored, mission-enabling survivability solutions to counter the rapidly evolving threats of the 21st century.

In 2019 North American Rescue was acquired by Henry Schein, a Fortune 500 healthcare supply chain company in the medical and dental space.

The Challenge

NAR had specific government contract opportunities which required an e-commerce portal with specific features supporting Business to Government (B2G) procurement standards, medical licensure management for pharmaceutical purchases, custom price lists and a host of other unique features.

In addition, the team at NAR needed to streamline the management of this new portal with custom ERP integration into their system of record.

Finally, security was of key importance given the nature of the government agencies NAR was serving.

The Solution

The defining characteristics of this project are security and customization. While there are many e-commerce platforms to choose from when looking to handle the features of a common shopping and checkout process, few came close to the needs of this project and those that did were cost prohibitive.

This is why we chose Drupal Commerce for this project. With 40,000 modules, the Drupal platform is like a composable solution system which, with a combination of custom modules, configuration and a little bit of code, we were able to build out exactly what NAR needed for a fraction of the cost of an off-the-shelf platform. 

Key project requirements included:

• Government grade security.
• Multi-role shopping experience
• Medical licensure management
• Price lists
• Custom integration

Security

In addition to a unique and broad array of custom e-commerce requirements, NAR needed this portal to be secure…REALLY secure. They had vetted other providers such as Shopify and hadn’t yet found a way to build a custom solution rapidly that met their need for both flexibility and security.

Drupal is the platform of choice for about 50% of the governments around the Globe as well as numerous Fortune 500 companies and universities. At the core of Drupal is a community curated open source approach to managing the platform and its 40,000 modules. Part of this community is dedicated to scanning modules for security issues and quickly addressing any issues as they are reported so the system is always up to date and secure.

This is why a well maintained Drupal installation is considered to be the gold standard for secure content management systems.

Acquia, the creator of Drupal, was chosen to host the site due to their broad array of security certifications including PCI, HIPAA, SOC2 and most importantly FedRamp for the US Department of Defense and related agencies.

Multi-Role Shopping Experience

Government agencies are required by law to exercise separation-of-concerns when doing business with vendors. For e-commerce, this means that a standard shopping cart simply won’t do. Instead, ecommerce transactions need to be completed by 2 - 3 separate people to select, approve and pay for purchases. Complex checkout workflows such as this are made easy thanks to Drupal’s robust open architecture placing it among the most malleable of commerce platforms.

Igility was able to easily implement this process enabling NAR’s government customers to comply with these requirements.

Medical licensure management

Following their recent acquisition by Henry Schein, NAR would be expanding the products they sell to include pharmaceuticals. Therefore, this site would have to include features to manage medical licensure information to ensure that only legally authorized users are purchasing certain products. 

Again, Drupal’s extensive API came to the rescue as we added a security layer to the cart allowing only medical professionals with a current license on file to purchase select products. This drastically streamlined the procurement process for these crucial products so they would get into the hands of medics in the field where they were needed.

Price Lists

B2B and B2G companies often join or negotiate contract pricing arrangements with their customers. NAR was no exception, particularly given their government business relationships such as GSA contracts. 

Therefore, a key goal of this project was to integrate price lists with their ERP system and automatically enroll users into pricing programs based on their ERP profile making management seamless for NAR’s customer support team.

Custom Integration

NAR’s back end systems didn’t have readily available integrations with any platforms, so another key requirement of this project was the creation of custom fault-tolerant ERP integration. Furthermore the number of products would be significantly expanded over time, so the integration would need to manage product creation and decommissioning, custom and standard price lists, user profiles and order information. 

Igility built an integration layer into Drupal which powers deep integrations such as this with a user interface for code-free field mapping as well as configuration of the integration. Fault tolerance ensures that in the event of maintenance outages or other issues with the ERP system data is immediately synchronized as soon as everything is back online. 

This integration enables the automated management of 5,000 products without breaking a sweat.

Magento Support

In addition, NAR needed support for its Magento e-commerce site as well. 

With Igility’s flexible staffing model, we are able to build teams to support websites, applications and mobile apps across the technology spectrum. We have experience with most content management systems on the market including AEM, Contentful, Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, Shopify and many more.

Within 2 weeks we were ready to take over their Magento site. We made significant improvements to the architecture and development operations of the system, then got to work on the security and feature development for the system.
 

Outcome and Conclusion

This project was a true showcase of the flexibility of the Drupal Commerce system and its ability to quickly adapt to unique use cases on a budget.

The project was completed on time and NAR was able to acquire government contracts that it otherwise would not have been able to handle.