Middleware Magic

Adjust font size:

Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : IT in manufacturing
Published : January 2006

At last the IT providers are beginning to deliver the integration they’ve been promising for so long. But it takes hard work, and money, reports John Dwyer

Xerox’s man is forthright. This has nothing to do with Sarbanes-Oxley, whatever’s in the press release. Its chief benefit is “to make it easy to do business with Xerox.” And it’s working.

The speaker is Steve Emecz, e-business manager for Xerox document supplies Europe (XDSE), and he’s talking about integration, the knotty business of linking expensive but incompatible IT systems. The promise is that such links will make it cheaper and quicker for collaborators to do what they do – and may even help customers and their suppliers do it better.

Few have an integration nightmare like XDSE’s. The €700 million (£470 million) supplier of paper, toner and office sundries for customers of its $17 billion (£10 billion) Xerox parent’s printing and copying machines operates in 15 European countries.

By the middle of 2002 XDSE’s and Xerox’s customers were pressing them to trade electronically. But how? XDSE deals directly with 50,000 major corporations, local authorities and governments among its 100,000 customer base. Until recently it processed 2.1 million customer orders, invoices and other documents a year by hand. Emecz says the orders come in by 40 different methods, 95 per cent for delivery next day. Neither customers nor suppliers – five big paper mill groups – would consider moving to one XDSE-preferred format.

“We’d gone through the whole [electronic data interchange (EDI)] point-to-point game… and we’d also done point-to-point XML,” says Emecz. Apart from the cost of processing orders, every time XDSE added a new customer it cost over $30,000 in regression testing.

External integration is not easy by conventional means, says Clive Longbottom of consultancy Quocirca. The proliferation of EDI standards makes it impossible for any supplier to trade with more than a few customers or suppliers in the way each prefers. So they pick half a dozen of each to integrate with and deal with the rest as best they can.

In recent research for integration sofware provider GXS, Quocirca found that over 80 per cent of respondents had EDI or internet-based systems at their disposal. But because of standards proliferation and other problems, 95 per cent of them relied on e-mail, telephone, fax and post. Quocirca says this puts up costs, “and the lack of traceability raises serious questions about the integrity of information with respect to governance and audit compliance.”

Rory O’Neill, GXS’s director of global alliances, says manual processes don’t keep pace with a growing business. He notes too that 60 per cent of invoices have errors.

This is why middleware providers like Sterling Commerce and GXS are beginning to be noticed. They provide ‘clearing house’ middleware which accepts all messages in all formats from supplier and customer, passes them on to their client in one preferred format, then accepts and resends client messages in each receiver’s preferred format. All the client need worry about is the content, not the format or its translation.

Steve Emecz of XDSE and his colleagues in Xerox machines decided on the latest middleware – an enterprise service bus (ESB) – from Manchester-based Wax Digital. XDSE started moving customers on to the system in June 2003.

How the ESB, which XDSE calls ‘Transactions’, works doesn’t matter. All Emecz knows is that XDSE customers now send and receive electronic messages directly from their business applications in any format into XDSE’s SAP enterprise system or, elsewhere in Xerox, one of 100 or more legacy systems. And those systems return invoices and other documents with the equivalent translations in the other direction. This has cut the cost per document by 85 per cent – and XDSE’s customers win the same benefits.

It’s a slow business. By the end of this year XDSE will have moved 125 customers. But they include the big bank and a national government which were threatening to take their business elsewhere: “We haven’t lost one customer in a business where we have a churn of customers, That’s extremely powerful. You can’t turn that into dollars.”

XDSE’s system is part of a new tide of technology based on the service oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA creates a blueprint of important processes and sets out the services that support these processes. The ESB is a service layer or ‘container’ which reduces the number of integrations needed between business logic and specific applications.

But you have to look at it from the perspective of business, not the technology, says Mike Gilbert of Newbury, Berks, based software specialist Micro Focus. “You can’t buy this off the shelf. You need to make an engineering investment in your existing IT to do this.” That said, “SOA is a key investment for any organisation that has IT.”

SOAs are gaining attention because of their relevance to web services (WSs), but WSs – a subject in themselves (see ‘The IT Highway’, November issue) – and SOAs are not the same. WSs use XML and other standards-based technologies to link different enterprise applications together. But SOAs can include wrappers or adapters for non-standards-based legacy systems and don’t need to include WSs at all.

WSs, says Mike Fuller, director of systems marketing at InterSystems, “is just a technical format. It’s a valuable tool but don’t think it’s going to solve your problems.” The same is true of an ESB.

Kimberly Clark Europe (KCE) used InterSystems’ Ensemble integration platform to tie together the 100 carriers in its European logistics operation from a centre in Brighton, Sussex. The integration involves fax, spreadsheet and EDI links to the logistics providers and in-house spreadsheet exchanges among KCE’s factories.

So far, says Longbottom, SOAs and WSs have usually been used to achieve integration between different applications inside an organisation, not to link applications in one organisation with those in other organisations.

It’s a crucial distinction. Even if one organisation standardises on a common SOA tool, its external collaborators are bound to use a different standard. A systems integrator has to build a link between them.

Again external integration is a process, not a technology issue, stresses John Burns, who is responsible for manufacturing and technology in BT’s consulting and systems integration business (CSI). If data quality is poor, the world’s best technological integration won’t prevent the two collaborators spending all their time arguing about the accuracy of the figures instead of talking about what direction the figures show they should be taking.

“This is 10 per cent technology and 90 per cent deployment,” says Emecz. He had trouble explaining it to colleagues: “It’s incredibly difficult to articulate what this is, and you can’t show it. It’s a piece of magic that happens, but you don’t actually see it.”

Steve Craggs, European chairman of the Integration Consortium, says two linking organisations have to decide and communicate what they expect of the other party. What formats will they use, and when will they pass what to whom? “You have to talk to each other… You’re still going to have to do data mappings and things, and it’s more difficult with an external company. That’s why people are still only doing these things internally.”

Despite the difficulties, however, this type of integration is speedier, cheaper and more flexible than hard automation, one application at a time.

And you can do it piecemeal, says Daniel Ball, marketing director at Wax Digital: “It has to be an iterative approach to developing an SOA. Do it piece by piece but with an eye on the larger game. Business requirements change, and the IT picture is one of flexibility. That makes it much easier and less expensive to accommodate that change and build for it.”

Jo Puri, IT consultant for Tetley, part of the Tata tea group, says a key reason for Tetley’s adoption of Seeburger’s integration tools was the need to improve his company’s data quality: “The business process is the important part… Technology for technology’s sake only adds cost. We were trying to improve and build a common process internally.”

Tetley was under pressure from Walmart offshoot Asda and other customers to adopt the AS2 internet-EDI standard. But Tetley also has many other customers filing orders in other preferred formats.

Puri was determined that the changes should be invisible both to customers and users: “One of the internal drivers was to keep it as much hands-off as possible.”

Automated workflows from one end of the business to the other were key: “We should only manage by exception, only touch the information if it needs touching.” This meant the stress would be on improving the processes: “Why are we touching it? Why is it wrong in the first place?”

Puri says orders that took up to half a day to put into the system are now entered in half an hour. Now 98 per cent of orders – in all kinds of formats – are coming into the Seeburger system.

Automating workflows forces you to define and improve business processes. And once you have done that, you can think about automating the links to suppliers and customers.

“Organisations that don’t have a handle on their internal integration would be well advised to think very carefully about that before they attempt any external integration,” says Burns.

Comments on this story

click here to add a comment

You must be registered & logged in to add comments
Please register

already have an account and just want to login?

email address
password
remember me