Introduction
As the UK High Street has faced tough trading times, and several high street stores struggled, a major retailer started acquiring the struggling stores. The retailer wanted to remodel the inherited store’s supplier transaction systems as the annual renewal fee of £1m for their existing trading system, MuleSoft, was deemed unacceptable. The new retailer wanted a new solution to digitise their transactions, at a lower cost & with scalability for both the original store, the major retailer, and their trading partners.
The solution
Taking advantage of our Integration Workshops and based on recommendations, the retailer approached Black Marble to implement this change. We proposed both BizTalk and Azure Logic Apps (a PaaS managed by Microsoft). The retailer liked how Logic Apps is a pay-as-you-use service in the cloud that has similar workflows to BizTalk, which would allow them to draw on some of their own expertise but in a new medium. And of course, savings.
A huge attraction for the change were estimated running costs of just £3,000-4,000 per year V an annual cost of £1 million for the MuleSoft License renewal. With 1,500 regular suppliers & an additional ~2,000 seasonal ones, they needed to transform their electronic trading processes, by collating esoteric supplier provided Electronic Data Interchange document types (EDI) in one set of consistent formats for reliable internal processing & perform the reverse on a per supplier basis. By reliably translating the old EDI message formats & manual communication for a variety of financial process such as invoices & shipping notices.
Using application insights (Azure Monitor) – the retailer can understand behaviour, measure key business metrics, in a user-friendly dashboard in Power BI. They are now able to spot the most valuable trading patterns & seasonal trends and make informed decisions on these actionable insights. The result? Beyond the obvious cost savings, there are other benefits including time savings on order processing scaled across not just House of Fraser, but the entire retailer group and their partners.
Benefits
The integration has future proofed the retailer for further acquisitions and new partner integrations able to be implemented in a modular fashion onto the existing solution, be they small to medium department store suppliers or titans of sportwear manufacture.
Black Marble kept to the very short timescales demanded. The deadline for the integration to be live in just 6 months. The project went live on time.
One of logic apps greatest strengths are their interoperability, the retailer’s finance database is an on-premises Oracle DB based solution, which we directly integrate with from the cloud via Azure Express Route and the On-Premises Data Gateway providing secure & resilient access to the database.
The retailer is also a big fan of the Microsoft Development stack & we used their expertise in Developing SQL Server Integration Services to compliment the new Logic App integrations. As new functionality has emerged in Logic Apps, we’ve been able quickly pivot and leverage that new functionality to create event driven integrations which makes our solution vastly superior to the pre-existing MuleSoft solution in a way which a year ago would not have been possible. This is a considerable improvement.
