North American Rescue

Opening the Government Procurement Channel

NARMD existed to open a door. Government medical, surgical, dental, veterinary, and pharmaceutical buyers were the market, and reaching them meant matching how those buyers are required to buy.

Government purchasing doesn't look like clicking "buy now." It runs on documented approvals, on rules about who may buy regulated products, and on records that hold up when a contracting officer or an inspector general asks how a specific purchase happened. None of that is optional. And before a government office will transact at all, the platform has to carry a security posture the office can accept. NAR had already learned that firsthand: platforms it evaluated before this build were turned down by its own government customers.

That was the bar NARMD had to clear on day one.

A Foundation Built to Government Standards

We built NARMD on Drupal Commerce and hosted it on Acquia Cloud, the combination NAR's government customers accepted. Acquia's Cloud Platform carries PCI compliance for payment handling and FedRAMP authorization for government workloads. NARMD itself ran on Acquia's standard cloud rather than the FedRAMP environment, and didn't need the latter: it holds no patient records and no government system data. What mattered to the buyers was the vendor behind the hosting, one their offices already trusted.

On that foundation we built the three things a procurement office needs before it will use a storefront: an approval process that matches how the office authorizes spend, controls that keep regulated products with licensed buyers, and fulfillment connected to NAR's operations. The rest of this case study is those three things.

How a Government Order Actually Gets Placed

Government procurement separates authority on purpose. The person who builds an order isn't the person who can commit the money. Most commerce platforms assume one shopper with one card, and government teams can't work that way.

NARMD matches the real chain of authority:

• A group administrator, usually the procurement office's senior buyer, controls who's on the account and what each person can see and spend.
• An order creator assembles the cart and submits it as a purchase request. They never touch payment.
• An order approver reviews the request item by item, approving, adjusting, or rejecting each line with a note, then releases the order or sends it back. Offices that keep a separate payer can route the approved order to that person for payment.

Every step is timestamped and on the record. Rejected items go back to the creator with the reason attached. Purchase-order and contract numbers ride on the order and show up on the invoice, and contract accounts carry a per-order spending limit the platform enforces. So when a contracting officer asks how a purchase happened, the answer is already there.

The same structure serves hospital purchasing committees and any large procurement team. The hardest case set the bar — keeping units supplied at remote, austere postings, where a missed or misrouted order has consequences that compound.

Securing Regulated Product Sales

Pharmaceuticals and controlled substances can only be sold to buyers who hold the right licenses. The rules are federal, and a distributor that gets them wrong has a much bigger problem than a returned order.

NARMD is built to keep that risk as low as a storefront can make it. Standard trauma gear sells to any approved account. Pharmaceuticals and controlled substances stay locked until the buyer's DEA registration and state licensing check out. A medical director registers those credentials once, and the platform extends purchasing rights to the providers working under that license, which is how these units are actually run.

The controls stay current on their own. If a license lapses, the platform stops that account from ordering regulated products until it's renewed. No spreadsheet to check, no manual audit, nothing that depends on someone remembering. And every product carries its drug class, its national stock number, hazard and temperature-control flags, and a downloadable safety data sheet where one is required, so a government buyer's own systems recognize exactly what was ordered.

Approved Orders Flow Straight Into NAR's ERP

An order that's approved but never reaches the warehouse is worse than one that was never placed, because someone at a remote post is counting on it. NARMD sends approved orders straight into NAR's operations system, Microsoft Dynamics GP, for picking, packing, and shipping, and syncs customer, product, and pricing data back the other way so the storefront always matches the system of record.

That connection is built to hold. If the operations system goes down for maintenance, orders wait safely instead of failing. Nothing slips through the gap between the website and the warehouse. It's the same ecommerce ERP integration pattern we bring to Igility's ecommerce work and our platform migration practice today.

Securing NAR's Government Procurement Channel

Government buyers were purchasing on NARMD from launch. A government contract customer was live on the platform on day one, and that office's purchasing requirements shaped the launch scope: billable contract accounts that check out on a purchase order rather than a credit card, per-order spending limits that keep an order inside the contract, and purchase-order numbers on every order and every report.

NAR kept investing in the channel after launch. A second phase of work added automatic account approval for registrations from recognized government email domains, placing each new buyer on the right contract price list the moment they signed up, along with separate price lists for government and municipal accounts and a catalog that shows each buyer only what their contract covers. Within its first year, NARMD had outgrown the Acquia hosting tier it launched on.

NAR's government commerce channel ran on NARMD — every account, every approval, and every order in that channel went through the platform Igility built. The buyers it was designed for showed up, registered, and bought.

Two Platforms, One Team

While NARMD was being built, and after it launched, Igility also ran NAR's existing NARescue.com storefront, on Magento, for the consumer-facing tactical-medical market. One team kept both moving: security patching, payments, coordination with NAR's other developers, and the discipline of running two commerce systems for one brand without letting either slip.

"The project management at the company was exemplary. They consistently delivered items on time, ensuring that every phase of the project adhered to the agreed-upon schedule." — Richard Rice, VP of Marketing, North American Rescue

"We were impressed with their confidence and experience with Drupal, as well as their project management for collaborating with Magento developers." — Director of Marketing Communications, North American Rescue, in a second Clutch review

What Comes Next: Government B2B Ecommerce Meets AI Procurement

Government and institutional buyers are starting to research purchases with AI the way commercial buyers already do. Sixty-one percent of large hospital networks planned to deploy AI-assisted procurement tools by the end of 2026, up from 18% in 2023. Seventy-three percent of B2B buyers now use AI tools during purchase research. The platforms that surface in those answers are the ones whose product information is clean, consistent, and easy for a machine to read. NARMD's product model was built that way for an older reason: government buyers order against national stock numbers, manufacturer part numbers, and drug classes, so every product carries them.

Build the foundation right once and the next phase compounds onto it instead of replacing it. For B2B commerce teams wondering whether their current platform can carry an AI-assisted buyer, the free AI Visibility Audit finds the gaps first.

The pattern repeats across our portfolio. The Helmer Scientific platform is still running eight years on, through a Trane Technologies acquisition. The Mobile Mini platform, our 2018 Acquia Engage Best ROI winner, is still running nine years on, through the WillScot merger. NARMD is the government-procurement member of the same family: build the foundation right, and it keeps paying off.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a B2B ecommerce platform need to sell to government buyers?

Four things. A hosting vendor the procurement office will accept: NAR's government customers had rejected other platforms NAR evaluated and accepted Acquia Cloud, a PCI-compliant platform from a FedRAMP-authorized vendor. An order approval workflow that separates the person who builds an order from the person who authorizes the spend, with purchase-order and contract numbers on the record. Product data that matches how government buyers order: national stock numbers, manufacturer part numbers, drug classes, hazard and temperature flags. And contract pricing, so each account sees the price list its contract entitles it to and nothing else. A storefront missing any one of them gets worked around with phone calls and purchase orders sent by email.

What is a three-tier approval workflow in B2B commerce?

It splits buying into three roles so no single person controls the whole purchase. A group administrator manages who's on the account and what they can spend. An order creator builds the cart and submits it for approval. An order approver reviews it, line by line if needed, and either releases the order or sends it back with notes. It mirrors how government procurement teams, hospital purchasing committees, and large enterprises assign buying authority, and on NARMD every step is recorded, so there's a clean audit trail behind each order.

Why did Igility build NARMD on Drupal Commerce?

The brief came down to two things: meet government procurement standards (layered approvals, regulated-product controls, a real audit trail) and run on hosting NAR's government customers would accept, which other platforms NAR had evaluated did not. Drupal Commerce on Acquia Cloud answered both: a flexible open-source commerce foundation we could shape to those exact requirements, on a PCI-compliant platform from a FedRAMP-authorized vendor. The platform shipped on an eighteen-week plan and went live as the government channel's storefront in 2021.

What does it take to sell pharmaceuticals on a B2B commerce platform?

Three things. The platform has to know which products are regulated, verify that a buyer holds the right license (DEA registration, state licensure) before they can purchase, and keep that status current, blocking an account whose license has lapsed until it's renewed. NARMD does all three at the platform level, so the check doesn't depend on a manual review on a busy day. It doesn't remove the distributor's obligations; it makes them the default behavior of the storefront.

How does NARMD connect to NAR's fulfillment systems?

Approved orders flow straight from NARMD into NAR's operations system, Microsoft Dynamics GP, for picking, packing, and shipping, and customer, product, and pricing data sync back to the storefront. The connection is built to hold: if the operations system is down for maintenance, orders wait safely rather than failing, so nothing is lost between the website and the warehouse.

How did the Mobile Mini engagement lead to the NARMD build?

The Mobile Mini platform Igility built in 2017, for a national B2B portable-storage company, won the 2018 Acquia Engage Award for Best Return on Investment on the strength of a 90-day break-even, a 23% lift in leads year over year, and a 30% lift in conversions. When North American Rescue was ready to stand up NARMD in 2019, its team came to Igility on the strength of that work: the kind of referral that follows demonstrated results into an adjacent industry.

Who buys through NARMD?

Government and institutional medical buyers, including the supply teams that keep personnel ready at remote posts in austere environments. The approval workflow, the regulated-product controls, and the connected fulfillment all exist because that buyer profile demands them. Which specific offices buy is NAR's to share, not ours; government procurement is the use case the platform was built around.

References

Client Attestation

• Clutch. Review titled "Web Development for Medical & Rescue Solutions Company," by Richard Rice, VP of Marketing, North American Rescue. 5.0 / 5.0 across quality, schedule, cost, and willingness to refer.
• Clutch. Review titled "E-Commerce Dev & Maintenance for Medical Equipment Provider," by a Director of Marketing Communications, covering the combined NARMD build and parallel Magento maintenance scope.

Customer Profile

• North American Rescue. "Products with a Mission®" — tactical medical equipment supplier serving combat medics, tactical EMS, law enforcement, and Fire / EMS customers.
• NAR Medical Depot. Government B2B ecommerce property serving government and institutional medical procurement teams.

Engagement Source

• Igility internal proposal (2019). "North American Rescue Medical Depot — Project Proposal," October 10, 2019. The eighteen-week proposal that became the NARMD scope of work.
• Igility internal scope documents. NARMD change orders (order workflow and payer step, line-item approval screen, purchase-order payment, product data fields) and the NARMD Phase 2 project brief (government-domain account approval, contract price lists). Internal source archive.

Referral Source

• Mobile Mini engagement (2017 – present). Drupal + Acquia Enterprise Cloud + custom Salesforce integration for a national B2B portable storage company. 2018 Acquia Engage Award for Best Return on Investment. The referral source for the NAR engagement. See Mobile Mini case study.

Hosting and Compliance

• Acquia Cloud Platform security documentation. Cloud Platform's PCI compliance and FedRAMP authorization. NARMD ran on Acquia's standard Cloud Platform, not the FedRAMP-scoped environment.
• Acquia Views and Visits report, September 2021. North American Rescue account, NARMD application: confirms the platform exceeded its original hosting entitlement within its first year of launch.

B2B Buyer AI Adoption (current-era context)

• Averi (2026). "73% of B2B Buyers Use AI Tools in Purchase Research, Multi-Source Analysis Finds." Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire. Analysis of 680 million citations, March 2026.
• Gartner (2025). "How Cloud and AI Are Transforming Healthcare Procurement." GHX Healthcare Hub. 61% of large hospital networks planned to deploy AI-assisted procurement tools by end of 2026, up from 18% in 2023.