Microsoft enterprise software developer nVisionIT has created a BizTalk Server information exchange solution for its client Wimpy that greatly improves data transmission between stores spread across SA and its head office located in Centurion.
A name that has become a household favourite across the country since its inception in 1967, Wimpy is a franchise of fast food stores renowned for quality and value.
BizTalk Server is a solution that allows the efficient and effective integration of systems through the establishment of manageable business processes. This enables orchestration and automation of interactions or information exchange in a flexible manner.
According to Jenny Romanelis, point of sale manager for the franchise, Wimpy relies on daily sales figures to track the effectiveness of promotions and special offers across branches, as well as keeping track of various other metrics that allow it to manage its stores.
Says Romanelis: "We receive up to six electronic files daily from approximately 240 Wimpy stores around the country - a total of about 1 000 e-mails, and this figure grows daily. The information gathered from the stores is vital as it allows us to plan our product mix, marketing and sales programmes and for our brand managers to gain insight to plan campaigns more effectively."
Prior to engaging nVisionIT to produce a new system, Romanelis says the process was too manual, requiring intervention from a staff member. The comma-delineated files, generated by point of sale terminals at outlets across the country, were e-mailed manually by store managers into an Outlook inbox. These files had to be copied offline from one mailbox to another, then Outlook had to go back online in order to apply the rules that discard incorrect information. Once checked, the files were copied into an SQL server database from which management reports were generated.
Additionally, the old system was unreliable and susceptible to crashes; when it did go down, a rapidly escalating backlog would make it very difficult for the company to catch up.
Using the Microsoft BizTalk orchestration environment, Werner van der Merwe, solution project manager at nVisionIT, explains that a solution was developed for Wimpy that automates the entire file collection process. "BizTalk was selected as the solution of choice as it provided the services that we required in terms of schema, document transformation and orchestration," he says.
Because it provides a framework for reliable delivery, the BizTalk solution ensures that documents can`t go missing. "The application monitors the mailbox at head office and requires no user interaction. It`s available 24 hours a day and processes each file as it arrives," he says.
Challenges that had to be overcome by nVisionIT`s developers included a multiplicity of file types and formats that had to be uniformly loaded into the database. "BizTalk also caters for any new file formats very quickly; during the course of the application development, we discovered additional formats and were able to modify the solution within hours, something that would have taken two weeks with the previous system," says Van der Merwe.
Romanelis says it was of utmost importance to the business to use technology that would allow easy integration while delivering the benefits of automation of the environment. "Some of our systems are quite dated - the POS terminals in some stores are still DOS-based. We therefore needed a solution that would not only integrate with new technology, but also with old systems," she explains.
Since implementing the solution, Romanelis says the number of uploads has increased and the speed of importing information into the database has increased phenomenally. "We used to manage one file every 30 seconds - now we can do 50 to 100 at the same time. Not only can we work through the information much faster, but we can also weed out problematic files through an improved rule set. Using BizTalk has delivered a major benefit for our business through improved speed and reliability."
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