- Overview
- By Industry
- Banking
- Business and Professional Markets
- Capital Markets
- Commercial Real Estate
- Federal/Public Sector
- Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
- Independent Software Vendors
- Insurance
- Lending
- Manufacturing
- Media/Entertainment
- Transportation/Distribution/Logistics
- Utilities/Telco
- By Area of Expertise
- Business Intelligence
- Custom .NET Application Development
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Workflow and Collaboration
Case Studies
Enterprise Application Integration Solution Reduces Costs
Project at a Glance |
|---|
RDA leveraged Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to automate processing of transactions from 30 different business partners for this leading product manufacturer. As a result, our client minimized their infrastructure and support costs by increasing efficiency of their IT department. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is a global leader in a highly specialized product category. With facilities in 22 nations on six continents, our client distributes its products in over 100 countries under some of the most well-established brand names in their industry.
Background
RDA's client predominately operates via an indirect model in which its products are sold through distributors to the end user. Its key distributors agreed to provide SKU level end user transactional data on a contemporaneous basis, which provides our client with unique insight into end user purchase behavior associated with the company's products. Our client sought to aggregate this data and make it available at the customer/product level through the Siebel Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Analytics applications. The ability to analyze end customer activity directly would enable the company to greatly enhance their marketing efforts and improve strategic product development.
The project was broken into a Siebel implementation team and a team to support integration from distributors providing POS data as well as between existing company systems and Siebel. The company partnered with IBM Business Consulting Services to gather high-level requirements and define functional specifications (interpreting those requirements into Siebel functionality) for the implementation of Siebel and Siebel Analytics.
RDA was brought in to apply Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2006 technologies to integrate Siebel's SFA and Analytics applications to support this effort.
Solution Detail
RDA implemented Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 as an enterprise integration hub to provide loose coupling between internal business systems, external distributors and Siebel SFA and Analytics applications. The architecture is primarily a message-based system interchanging data throughout the enterprise, on demand, in a manageable and scalable way.
The enterprise is made up of primarily six areas or interfaces: Siebel SFA, Siebel Analytics, Trading Partner Management (TPM), External Distributor Interfaces (EDI), CDI (Customer Data Integration / Account matching and cleansing), and BPCS (ERP). Together, they facilitate all Siebel enterprise integration and continuous Point of Sale (POS) integration requirements in a cost effective way. Additionally, the architecture is easily enhanced and scaled to accommodate new enterprise integration requirements, capacity and load.
Benefits
Our client experienced the following benefits as a result of this project:- Minimized infrastructure and support costs
- Minimized implementation costs
- Maximized value of legacy systems
- Maximized value of integration resources
The project was also the springboard for the company's new U.S. Strategic Partnership Program, which will significantly improve its ability to collaborate with and provide value to key distributor partners. This program will result in a consolidated network of U.S. distributors and will provide our client with an increased ability to deliver greater customer-focused services to its distributor partners and professional end users.
This solution provides RDA's client with the capability to leverage SharePoint, BizTalk, and ASP.NET functionality to automate processing of daily and weekly transactions from 30 different business partners.
Management of these 30 different distributors all passing data in on different days, times, and formats would be extremely labor intensive without the automated pickup and processing available from BizTalk and the reporting capabilities leveraged in SharePoint and ASP.NET. The fact that the system runs largely by itself allows the IT staff to concentrate on resolving processing exceptions without having to spend the majority of their time kicking off jobs, etc.
Technically Speaking
RDA utilized Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, Host Integration Server 2006 (DB2 Adapter), SharePoint Services, SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET Web Services and an EDI Adapter/Accelerator from Covast for this project.
Implementation Highlights
Data from approximately 30 distributors is uploaded to this client via FTP, email or through a Partner specific SharePoint portal.
Incoming POS data can be uploaded in one of many formats such as CSV, Flat, X12-867 and XML. POS interchanges (batches of POS data)
are consumed by the TPM interface, parsed, split and converted to single XML POS messages. An acknowledgement is delivered back
to the sending party, the POS data is preprocessed and a common POS message is delivered to the enterprise. Additionally, a set
of unique Distributor Accounts are delivered to the AS/400 based Customer Data Integration (CDI) system to be matched to internal
accounts. If no match is found, a new account is created.
As incoming POS messages are consumed by the Common POS interface, each message is queued up to await the arrival of messages from the CDI interface. In response to TPM publishing a list of unique accounts to CDI, the CDI interface will publish a message indicating one or more accounts are known. It will also publish messages identifying new accounts. The POS interface will subscribe to these messages and will react by checking its POS hold queue for messages awaiting the validation of a given account. Once all accounts for a given POS message are validated, the message is removed from the queue and made available for additional validations.
The POS interface will continue to validate the POS product data for SKU's via reusable service exposed by the Siebel Sales Force Automation (SFA).
Once the POS message is validated, the POS messages are filtered to contain only valid SKUs and the validated POS message is published to the enterprise for downstream processing and delivery to the Siebel Analytics database.
Hardware Info:
- BizTalk Server 2006 - 2 procs
- SQL Server 2006 - 4 procs, clustered
- Windows SharePoint Services / FTP Server - 2 procs
Message Volume:
Over 5 million point-of-sale messages with approximately 12 million invoiced items processed over the last 4 months from
approximately 30 different distributors.
