The Binding Glue for a Large Supply Chain Revamp
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 Need
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.
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
Next