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GLOBAL RETAILER: SOA | TIBCO | BI

 

ORGANIZATION

The Client is a global shoe retailer operating over 4800 stores across North and South America. A previously implemented online portal served as an additional sales channel to augment revenue from its retail stores. Orders were received on this eCommerc portal with an option of either shipping product to a store (in-store pickup) or directly to the customer via carrier such as UPS, USPS or APO/FPO. Additionally the client was in the process of establishing a new Distribution Center (DC) with its own instance the order fulfillment system.

CHALLENGE

With the addition of the online store and the DC, the business requirement was to send the eCommerce orders to the new DC designated for fulfillment of online orders. A further strategic requirement imposed was that, the following business scenario was anticipated to occur based on future operational decisions:
  • Fulfilling the eCommerce orders from both the DCs
  • E-Commerce fulfillment operations being split away from both the DC’s
  • The requirement was to provide a solution that would:
  • Fulfill the current requirement to send online orders to one of the designated DCs for fulfillment
  • Be extendable and adaptable to cater to the changing business scenario with no disruption
TECHNICAL LANDSCAPE The technical landscape was characterized by the following:
  • Data from the eCommerce portal was propagated daily to the mainframe inventory system
  • The WMS with two instances one for each of the DCs performed the task of order fulfillment
  • No standard integration pattern as most of the data transfers were CSV file transfer based
  • The mainframe data extraction replete with timeliness, completeness and accuracy issues
  • The integration solution demanded compatibility with diverse technology platforms including mainframes, AS-400 systems and newer client server technologies
  • The interface was required to function in near real-time so as to provide rapid fulfillment to the customers from the time of order

SOLUTION

XTIVIA designed and delivered the near real-time integration solution using TIBCO™ technologies. XTIVIA leveraged best practices from Integration, SOA and BI to implement the solution. The XTIVIA team analyzed the existing applications, and based on the business requirements provided a solution based on the VEST (Validation, Enrichment, and Standardization & Transformation) approach. The solution was also engineered to attain a critical business goal one of reusability of the existing services and adherence to the retail industry standards. XTIVIA developed reusable BW templates in order to jump start the development of the individual interfaces. The approach also required XTIVIA to fully develop all the common services such as Notification, Exception Handling, Transaction Logging and Auditing in accordance with pure SOA principles. These common services were leveraged across multiple projects throughout the client’s applications enterprise wide. The engineered solution utilized TIBCO EMS as the enterprise messaging backbone upon which all the services and ancillary applications communicated with each other. The final and delivered integration solution was scalable and extendable. The solution was characterized by usage of the common data model to build a subscribing component for any future initiatives to integrate other enterprise application. The XTIVIA Integration solution had the components for:
  • Pick Ticket: This interface sent the E-Commerce orders to the WMS. The WMS system then allowed the operators to pick the items in each order for a customer
  • Trailer Close: This interface provided the feedback to the Mainframe Inventory Management system for the fulfilled E-Commerce orders, including whether the order was delivered to the store (for in-store pickup) or directly to the customer
  • Zero Picks: This interface provided the Mainframe Inventory Management system with information on those orders that were not shipped the same day. This interface was designed to keep the Host system in-sync with the DC E-Commerce order status

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RESULTS

  • Reduction in the previously recorded E-Commerce order fulfillment time to customers
  • Increase in efficiency of delivery of the E-Commerce orders to customers
  • Ability to pack in-store E-Commerce orders with regular store shipments out of the DC
  • Provide users with insight into fulfillment status of all E-Commerce orders
Obtain scalability to cater to any increase in volume of E-Commerce orders

KEY COMPONENTS

TECHNOLOGIES USED TIBCO™ BusinessWorks TIBCO DataExchange TIBCO Rendezvous TIBCO EMS TIBCO Object Star Adapter for Files (z/OS) Adapter for Files (UNIX) Download the Case Study PDF here

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