Packaged Application Services
Case Studies
Fortune 100 Food Products Company Optimizes Supply Chain
The Client
A Fortune 100 company, the client is the largest food products marketing and distribution organization in North America. With operations in more than 160 locations across US and Canada, it provides an inventory of more than 275,000 products to more than 420,000 restaurants, schools, hotels, health care institutions, and other food service customers.
Business Challenge
To optimize its supply chain, which was crucial to its success and continued growth, the company decided to take a bold initiative to remodel its supply chain by setting up local distribution centers. This program aimed at bringing about efficiency in the redistribution of products from supplier source to primary distribution point.
The company had several operating units, which were its distribution subsidiaries in various regions. All these were running on different platforms such as IBM AS400, IBM AIX, etc. The information systems running across these locations had been built on several different homegrown applications. Over the years, the client had also acquired many small companies that had their own disparate IT systems. These were interoperable on a point-to-point basis and lacked total integration. The client needed a seamless, integrated system to improve operational efficiencies across the enterprise. It decided to take the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) path, which would enable it to continue to use its legacy applications and databases while adding other new technologies to support its phenomenal growth.
From a technology perspective, the EAI initiative included seamless integration of eight applications including legacy systems, custom-built and packaged solutions forming an entirely new layer of supply chain systems.
Through this initiative, the client - in addition to fulfilling the business needs - envisioned laying the foundation for EAI Infrastructure to support its future enterprise needs and strategic goals.
The key to success for an EAI effort is gaining a deep insight into the company's business processes and information systems. The diverse technology platforms of the client coupled with the fact that EAI is not a technology one can implement right out of the box, meant numerous challenges.
- Critical to success was aligning the EAI strategy with the overall IT strategy of this initiative
- The scattered business processes that had crept in because of the company's numerous past acquisitions had to be rationalized and integrated before EAI could be initiated
- The program had multiple tracks that overlapped with the other processes of the client. On an average, each proposed center was linked with up to 70 operating company facilities. Each of these facilities fed into separate end-users, and thus had different requirements. All this meant that Infosys had to deal with EAI project interdependencies between multiple tracks in the program without affecting the other business processes of the client
- A large number of the client's business processes were also being redefined. Managing EAI design and development to meet with continuously changing requirements was a daunting task
- This was the first large-size EAI implementation using onsite-offshore model for development. An effective communication and issue resolution process was imperative to the success of the project. Infosys had to develop an issue resolution system and facilitate co-ordination between 35 team members
Technology
- The presence of multiple vendors in the initiative rendered integration difficult with players driving requirements from their respective applications. Requirements from all the vendors were to be taken into consideration while performing this integration against stringent timelines
- Infosys had to build over 95 interfaces to facilitate interoperability of a large number of applications running on disparate technologies
- While a few application packages were common across the enterprise, others were unique to the local centers. The task of parallel implementation of packages without affecting the businesses outside the scope of EAI integration was complicated
- The danger of poor quality EAI owing to continuously changing technology requirements of the client loomed large
- Finally, an efficient system for uninterrupted connectivity between offshore and onsite locations needed to be put in place
The Infosys Approach
Infosys had already been involved with maintenance of the client's corporate systems for two years so it had a good understanding of the organization and its business - factors critical for successful implementation of EAI. Infosys was involved as a technical service partner to design, construct and implement the EAI platform for the pilot program. After mapping business processes of the client to integration requirements - factoring in the current environment and future plans of the food products giant - Infosys selected WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) Suite of products.
Infosys partnered with the client to:
- Chart out the processes, and implement the EAI infrastructure integrating multiple applications
- Customize and enhance the existing legacy systems to integrate into the new application architecture. This also involved data conversion and migration from the legacy systems into the new packages
- Jointly manage the integration exercise, coordinating with multiple package vendors to ensure that the synergies of the diverse processes were harnessed and integrated
- Lay the foundation for the technical infrastructure framework for total end-to-end EAI implementation
Infosys, with a clear understanding of the business model, processes and goals, adopted a partnership approach and co-coordinated with the project management team of the client right from the beginning. Infosys' EAI project manager was involved in the exercise of defining interface requirements and specific applications/ package implementations. The composite team ensured optimal utilization of the resources of Infosys and the client.
Strategy
Infosys' proprietary Global Delivery Model(GDM) to manage change and facilitate communication process between onsite-offshore teams proved invaluable in this context.
- The first phase involved analysis and scoping - systems overview, scope definition and solution architecture
- The second was for EAI interface development and implementation
Infosys also defined the Operational Architecture for the client, which included the definition and design of monitoring solution, exception handling solution, governance architecture, and finally performance and optimization of EAI interfaces.
The most critical issue in this project was to manage the overlapping phases - the processes across the enterprise overlapped with that of the local centers thereby making interfacing a difficult task. To tackle this, Infosys created two tracks: parallel and independent based on the availability of the requirement specifications for that interface. Infosys also created a Project Management (PM) track and a technical track for dedicated focus on these areas. This effort considerably speeded up the project by aligning the delivery dates for EAI interfaces with minimum impact to the overall schedule.
The CMM level 5 practices coupled with Infosys' proven process of development based on checklists and templates while maintaining design and scrupulous documentation, and stringent reviews by senior team members considerably eliminated performance bottlenecks and potential failure of the EAI architecture.
Benefits
- Cost savings: The client witnessed significant cost savings as Infosys Global Delivery Model (GDM) methodology ensured greater offshore capabilities. Since the development infrastructure was located at the client site and the offshore team connected to it from Infosys' Bangalore ( India) facility, no separate environment was setup for offshore development
- Quality gains: By extending Infosys mature quality processes for mutual gains
- Knowledge Management: Infosys has put in place a repertoire of knowledge artifacts that the client can access for its future initiatives – templates, standards and checklists are readily available
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Testimonials
"Infosys is a different kind of consulting firm, their conceptualization and excellent execution is their secret sauce. [Their] methodologies and models are instrumental in guiding us in the direction of success."- CIO, top US apparel and shoe retailer
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