Global Order Integration

Maximizing reuse and self-service while accelerating market and channel onboarding

Industry

Manufacturing

Company Size

Multinational

Products

Health, home, and hygiene

Key Factors of Success
  • AS400Gateway for MuleSoft
  • The unique combination of legacy and modern platforms
  • MuleSoft’s AnyPoint Platform
Outcomes
  • Accelerated market and channel onboarding.
  • Faster project delivery
  • Lower project costs
  • Increased levels of reusability

The Customer

A leading multinational health, home, post-natal, and hygiene products company with global manufacturing, distribution, and fulfillment operations. Efficient and consistent order entry and fulfillment is a key business capability and success factor.
The Customer
The Solution

The Challenge

Complex order management processes spanning over a large number of order channels, source applications and ERP’s in multiple countries. Over time, the customer’s IT and vendor teams developed a large number of country and channel specific point to point integrations. The resulting tight coupling and redundant management overhead led to an increase in operating costs causing difficulties when onboarding new channels and distributors. In addition, both governance and operational efficiency were limited. As the number of channels and fulfillment options grew, the problem became more and more evident.

Additionally, the customer operated many markets on JDE World – IBM i (AS/400) ERP. With no out of the box order entry and status capture plug-in available, each system is heavily customized for each country.

The Solution

Infoview Systems professional services team developed a unified global order integration solution based on the Mulesoft Anypoint Platform. The new solution decouples channel applications from order fulfillment systems. It maximizes reuse and self-service while accelerating the time of both market and channel
onboarding.

image of integration services
The Design

The Design

In the summer of 2013, our legacy modernization team began AS/400 development projects. Over the next two years, we built trust, learned core business processes, and helped business and IT in identifying and addressing gaps and pain points.

In the fall of 2013, our integration team was tasked with documenting existing integration solutions and developing the interfaces between e-commerce and back-end AS/400 applications. We designed, sized, procured, and configured the infrastructure/application stack. Our team still “owns” the eCommerce interfaces, providing ongoing support, enhancements, and troubleshooting.

In the winter of 2015, our team built a business case for the Integration platform using the MuleSoft stack. We worked with IT leadership on ROI, provided high-level reference architecture, sized the solution, and created a proof of a concept Mule application. The concept application communicates with AS400 via custom Java components, as well as template AS/400 code that “talks” to Mule.

Results

The multitude of ad-hoc point to point integrations were replaced with a unified, flexible and secure global order integration solution. The onboarding of new channels is now only taking weeks. Enabling new markets within those existing channels can be achieved in days. The Process API layer exposes common channel and endpoint capabilities, as well as data models in a system-agnostic formats. This hides the complexity of integrating with JDE and other order fulfillment systems. The solution can easily be extended to support new channel or market specific requirements without the need to rebuild the entire integration. IBM i (AS400) integration components support most market specific JDE customizations and enable near
real time event-based integrations at a fraction of the cost of established CDC tools.
Results
Conclusions

Conclusions

The professional services team of Infoview’s integration team continued with over 25 MuleSoft integration projects in the customers’ pipeline. This was done in addition to working with IT management on the 2016 Road Map to include implementing the API management platform and considering using CloudHub for integrating with SaaS providers.

Copyrights © 2022 by Infoview Systems Inc.

Infoview got the Best Place to Work Award Infoview Systems Inc. is Accredited with FSQS CertificationInfoview Systems Inc is delighted to announce that we are certified with the world's most recognized ISO standards – ISO 27001 Infoview Systems Inc is delighted to announce that we are certified with the world's most recognized ISO standards – ISO 9001 - 2015 ISO 9001-20015
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