Customer Background

The customer is a leading worldwide manufacturer and supplier of a broad line of passive electronic components and interconnects. It enjoys significant and competitive advantages including the benefits of having research, manufacturing, and customer support facilities in multiple countries located around the world. This assures customers of the most efficient balance of delivery and production capability in response to the client's just-in-time inventory requirements.

Technology Used

The products and technologies used in this effort by Miracle team and the customer were,

• IBM mainframe running COBOL and IBM DB2
• Software AG webMethods Integration Server
• Software AG webMethods Trading Networks
• Microsoft SQL Server

The Business Challenge

• The customer operates its business globally across Americas and EMEA, and was facing the following challenges with its integration platform,Legacy EDI transactions running on mainframe which were developed using COBOL
• Over 300 EDI Transactions across 60+ different trading partners
• Being in the process of retiring its mainframe applications
• Multiple software applications being used for B2B integration with partners rather than a centralized solution

The customer's EDI applications were business-critical and needed to be migrated to a modern platform which provided higher reliability and efficiency while also being budget friendly for management and maintenance of the applications. Our Solution and Support

Miracle provided an end-to-end solution for this migration with webMethods being chosen as the new target platform. Following are some of the activities and business functionalities that it delivered as part of this migration effort,

• Extensively working with the client's business analysts to understand existing mapping and business logic in COBOL programs and creating mapping specification documents for each of the EDI transactions
• Developing highly optimized and efficient mapping logic and process flows for each of the EDI document in webMethods integration server environment
• End-to-end integration testing in Miracle's own development environment before deploying 120 such interfaces to the customer's testing environment
• Completion of all phases of the platform migration on time with highest quality and efficiency through Miracle's Hybrid Delivery Model

Customer Benefits

Post migration of all the B2B related functionality from Legacy to webMethods platform the customer had several business benefits, some out of which are mentioned below,

• Consolidation of all of its B2B Trading Partners into one centralized location using webMethods Trading Network
• Miracle's creation of an innovative solution leveraging the webMethods framework to provide self-service partner on-boarding process that allowed the trading partners to register and on-board their operations via AS2, EDI and other connectivity protocols
• Saving of a significant amount of time and cost, and increased ROI by the customer on-boarding more trading partners
• Consolidation of all its distributed B2B applications into webMethods Integration Server using highly efficient data mapping functions and very easy to use and modify integration patterns via webMethods native support for industry standard application adapters and protocols such as JDBC, FTP, SFTP, AS2, EDI etc
• The customer seeing a huge advantage to manage all its business process and day-to-day operational activities, and increased efficiency and response times to resolve issues related to EDI transactions, production support tickets, and related activities
• With webMethods being a modern technology platform compared to mainframe, customer having flexibility to implement several features like ESB, API and more to extend the business functionality across the organization seamlessly which was a major benefit for re-usability and centralized governance