Customer Background

The customer is a privately held Food Distributor headquartered in the USA. With over 30 years of food distribution expertise and over 800+ associates they are the leader in the space of food distribution. They are also proudly the second largest food distributor for the US Military and covers vast parts of the Western United States with their major distribution centers and networks. They work in the procurement, storage and distribution of many household brands to ensure that the goods got delivered reliably everyday.

Technologies Used

The following technologies were used in this implementation :

• IBM Sterling B2B Integrator
• Miracle's Supply Chain Visibility Portal
• ASP.NET

The Business Challenge

With over 500,000 Commercial and Military EDI documents flowing through their B2B systems everyday, they needed a sound system to ensure business excellence for the future. With a fully automated yet legacy-grade system, made up of CLEO MFT, Gentran EDI processes and AIX Korn Shell Scripts, their EDI processing capabilities were sturdy but not enterprise-class. They needed a modern and scalable platform to ensure their business growth for the future.

Some of the challenges that they had were,

• An Outdated Legacy EDI Platform
• Sunset of Software Support for Products in use
• Cost and Cumbersomeness of Legacy System Maintenance
• Lack of Flexibility and Scalability with the platform
• A dying skill-set and Knowledge Transfer/Succession Problems
• Lack of visibility and control for their EDI Transactions

How We helped

Our expertise in the space of EDI Transformation and MFT Solutions helped us to quickly analyze the existing platform and project a framework-based solution versus the existing piecemeal solution. In no time we were able to understand their pain-points and quickly apply a flexible and customizable solution to their challenges.

The highest priority was to give them a consolidated platform with updated technology and skill sets so that their enterprise could sustain growth for the future. With vast experience in B2B platform consolidation and migrations, it wouldn't be a problem to migrate them from the Legacy GIS systems to IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. The challenge was to solve their visibility and control problem as well.

It is absolutely critical for logistics providers and Supply Chain Managers to have a great amount of visibility and control over their daily EDI transactions. That is exactly what we provide through our Miracle's Supply Chain Visibility Portal . We were able to implement the portal in no time on top of IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, which enabled them to use the self-service portal to view and control their huge number of EDI transactions.

Benefits and Result

Even though it was a huge effort, the migration and implementation of the Miracle's Supply Chain Visibility Portal was seamless and helped the customer to fulfill their goals perfectly. Some of the benefits that they gained through the migrations were,

• Visibility into their 500K+ EDI documents
• Control over their EDI transactions
• Self-Service Portal for internal/external usage
• Reporting and Analytics facility through portal
• Consolidated and Updated EDI Platform
• Reduced support costs through platform consolidation
• SLA Enforcement and Monitoring Capabilities
• Improved reliability for EDI Transactions
• Reprocessing capabilities for overdue transactions