System Associates has developed the Health Protection Agency (HPA) Culture Collections website.
The e-commerce site brings together four previously separate culture collections into one domain.
System Associates has provided design, content management, digital asset management, data integration, search, hosting, training and 24-hour support for the site.
The project involved the integration of four separate databases, as well as the integration of a customer database for online ordering.
More than 40,000 cell lines, bacteria, viruses or fungi can now be accessed via the site and are typically purchased by hospitals, universities and laboratories to further medical research.
Users of the site are able to browse by 11 different search criteria, including A-Z, reference number, name, type of culture, culture associated with a specific part of the body, or ailment.
A search will retrieve the most relevant information about a culture, as well as useful papers and resources associated with that culture.
Helping to facilitate this retrieval is System Associates' content management and digital asset management software, which makes it as easy as possible to add and cross-reference items to the collections.
The content management system also has a versioning facility that allows content providers to edit documents, while old versions are still live, to ensure that each culture is available online even when being updated.
Registered users of the system can order cultures directly from the website and, at present, the order is then passed to operations for dispatch.
Phase II of the site will see the CRM, logistics and financial systems also integrated, to provide a seamless experience from ordering to dispatch.
