At a glance.
Mutual Drug
Mutual Drug was founded in 1952 as a member owned network of independent pharmacies. The founders dreamed of a customer-owned service corporation where they could obtain merchandise at a reduced wholesale cost and pass on the savings to their customers. Today, Mutual Drug is a billion-dollar business that supplies more than 500 pharmacies with over 25,000 drugs and other items.
www.mutualdrug.com/
Discovery – Design – Development – Deploy – Delight
The ask.
With 500 member pharmacies reselling their products through Mutual Drug’s online member portal, MDMembers, Mutual Drug’s IT team knew the importance of superior network reliability. To ensure accurate delivery and supply of many potentially life-saving items, they needed a stable custom ordering platform. In order to deliver a more reliable solution, they knew they also needed a better hosting solution for the MDMembers web portal.
The solution.
Through an analysis of Mutual Drug’s existing application, hosting, and endpoints, Atlantic BT suggested improvements to MDMembers portal application that would better engage customers and improve the level of service the organization could deliver. A new cloud-based .NET application was proposed which included asynchronous data transfer with the ERP, a DEA approved library for allowing controlled substance orders, and admin dashboard for monitoring trends and problems.
The end result.
The updated application was launched in parallel-processing mode, ensuring any data changes in the new environment would also correspond to the existing environment. Atlantic BT created a scalable and fault-tolerant hosting solution on Amazon Web Services. We developed and implemented a hosting transition plan that handled migration, load testing, contingency, and Quality Assurance (QA) with zero impact to Mutual Drug’s customers. For the four years the application was active and the system remained secure and successful – by allowing for thousands of daily orders, availability during the highest usage peaks, and zero-downtime deployments.