Information Dispatch
Creating a system of automated integrations to comply with government-imposed shipping and receiving regulations
Industry
Manufacturing
Company Size
Multinational
Products
Health, home, and hygiene
Key Factors of Success
- Infoview’s team of cross-platform JDE World and MuleSoft expertise played a key role in fast delivery with minimal dependencies
- MuleSoft’s AnyPoint Platform is a low code dev environment that helped rapidly release the integrations in scope
Outcomes
- Compliance with local government requirements regulating shipment and receipts of particular products and materials
- Fully automated integration between the customers ERP and the governments electronic services
- No ERP changes and limited to no ERP support team involvement
- Advanced exception handling with built-in auto-recovery and ops teams alerting.
The Customer
A leading global manufacturer and distributor of health, home, and hygiene products with manufacturing operations based across Europe. The customer operates in all regions and runs on a variety of ERPs, including JDE World. A major contributing factor to the success of these operations is the ability to successfully comply with government-imposed regulations regarding the documentation of all order shipments to and from their factory and warehouse.
The Challenge
Per regulations imposed by the government, most shipments between the customer-owned factory, the warehouses, and distribution centers are required to be documented and sent to the government electronic service. The legacy and heavily customized ERP does not have out-of-the-box APIs for extracting the right transactions and required a lot of data and legacy code analysis to identify the right source tables and columns. There are several specific requirements for transaction selection, formats, and security.
The Solution
Infoview’s Professional Services team developed a standards-based integration solution based on MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform. The solution will ensure each dispatch sent between the factory, distribution centers, and the warehouses is exchanged with the government electronic services in the regulation desired form as an e-dispatch document.
The Design
The design for this project included two main features:
- Outbound integrations
- Inbound messaging
Outbound integrations would extract the dispatch information from the JDE ERP, format a web service transaction, and then send the web service transaction to government endpoints. When receiving an inbound message from the electronic services, the program would produce either a success or an error message. This would indicate if the transaction was updated successfully or if there was an issue with the messaging flow.
MuleSoft’s platform was the main component to integrate JDE and government electronic services together. It created a pathway for data to flow seamlessly in-between the two separate programs, which resulted in fluent communication between the manufacturer and the Government, ultimately ensuring all the new regulations were complied to.
Results
Due to Infoview’s guidance and implementation, there is no longer a need to create separate SOAP or REST web services/webhook for IDEA to publish documentation regarding each order shipped to the government. Documentation can now easily be sent and quickly delivered, ensuring compliance with each shipment while additionally saving the time once previously required for the same documentation and publication process. The integrated program in place will now update the government in real-time and additionally has multiple safety nets in place to ensure reliable communication to avoid any penalties that result from late documentation.
Conclusions
The professional services team at Infoview was an excellent fit to take this initiative. Due to our in-depth knowledge of JDE and MuleSoft, we were able to step right in, draft a solution per the requirements, analyze the complex customized JDE data structures and programs, and begin resolving the problem immediately. Our integration expertise helped create fluid communication between JDE and the Government services which set up the client for success now and in the future. In the scenario this solution needs to be used at another factory location, the integration processes can easily be re-used and adjusted per business or regulatory requirement.
