Business-wide integration more feasible than ever – and saving serious bucks

Business process-centric integration – BPI, specifically targeting data connectivity at big picture cross-function, cross people, cross system, cross business and site operations – is saving manufacturers like DMC Stratex and Goodman in the US hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the IT, business consultancy and methodologies to get there are now robust, packaged and coming down in price and implementation time scale, and up in power. So says software developer Vitria, which claims to have “founded the idea of BPI”, as opposed to its system integration roots at the data level. The firm has just launched its latest iteration of BusinessWare, now at v4, and claims rapid implementation, reduced risk and fast routes to major savings, particularly on the big end-to-end deals of demand fulfilment processes, engineering change management and e-procurement. Chris Phillips, European marketing and product director, says that most large global manufacturers, which represent about 20% of Vitria’s market, are currently encumbered with unnecessarily slow and costly processes, high staffing and expensive finished goods and work in progress (WIP) inventories due to systems not ‘talking’, errors and poor ‘visibility’. He points out that typically the big business processes span multiple systems – like EDI, sales order processing, scheduling, logistics, pricing, credit checking and core manufacturing applications – and sites. And even if users have standardised on, for example, SAP or Oracle, they still have multiple instances and versions, as well as links into bespoke and legacy systems. The result: he claims that whereas order entry accuracy, for example, may well be around 96—98%, due to “the gaps, data re-entry, problems, exceptions, inconsistencies and poor communications between systems and people,” that will fall to “50—70%” when it comes to invoicing. And hence the current high costs in terms of people, resources and inventory essentially dealing with recovery and resolution. By looking to BPI systems all that can be transformed. BusinessWare defines a graphical model of the relationships between processes, systems and people and then builds the physical connectivity to drive, automate and expose the movement of data and associated workflow and activities to change all that. Users get end-to-end visibility, massive cost reductions and from the visibility, also agility to respond faster to business opportunities. The results across many of Vitria’s 500-plus users have been impressive to say the least. At DMC Stratex, for example, total order processing time was cut from 14 days to just two by integrating the associated business processes across six systems – and that was achieved in four months. Similarly, at Goodman Manufacturing, within 90 days the firm had cut finished goods inventory and WIP by 30%, improved order fill rate by 20% and cut month end reconciliation from 15 days to one. In both cases, the savings run into many hundreds of thousands of dollars: serious money and rapid return against project costs starting around the $250,000 mark. Vitria’s new software now includes a new graphical high level modeller and lifecycle management system making it easier, faster and cheaper to navigate through design, test, deployment and change management. It’s also entirely software component-based – meaning re-usable business services from any mix of application integration steps – and it’s ‘transport-independent’, meaning it can run on any number of messaging infrastructures, like IBM’s WebSphere MQ and Java Messaging Service (JMS). In short, it’s upped the ante at the top business analysis and deployment level and at the bottom data integration level, which has largely been commoditised anyway with data integration adapters and platforms widely available. In a sense it’s had to do this: there are other ways and other vendors today. Enterprise application integration (EAI) software developers IBM, Tibco, Seebeyond and WebMethods spring instantly to mind. And the ERP vendors themselves are pushing forward with, for example, SAP’s X-apps and Baan’s Value Apps and OpenWorldX framework. Then again, there are Web services, standards and adapters making life easier. Nevertheless, Phillips makes a good case for Vitria in terms of its maturity, expertise and universality. Best of breed EAI, he says, still ain’t as easy as it might appear. “You can buy piece parts to do some or all of this, but it’s absolutely not the best solution. If you’re talking about complex process integration, the issues will include multiple administration screens, different modelling and execution tools, different semantic transformation tools and so on, all of which will be harder to change and manage over time.”