Solit completes first phase of R1m-plus SunChemical financial integration project

E-business and enterprise software solutions company Solit has completed development on the first phase of a R1 million-plus financial integration project it is undertaking at multinational SunChemical Corporation, the world's largest manufacturer of colour pigments and printing inks. A pilot project is under way in Belgium and Germany, soon to be extended to the UK and the rest of Europe.

The first phase involved replacing SunChemical's proprietary enterprise application integration (EAI) technology to improve communication and synchronisation of data between the company's three broadly distributed systems: Coda Financials, Wonderware Protean enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and Wonderware Avantis asset management and procurement system using Microsoft BizTalk Server.

The new integration system will help SunChemical's international standardisation and roll-out project, whereby the three systems are gradually being rolled out to hundreds of sites worldwide.

"The main problem with the legacy integration system is that it was designed using a rigid structure, which does not easily facilitate business changes," says James Houghton, director of applications and development at SunChemical.

The high level of customisation required every time the company needed to set up a new site or when business changes occurred compounded this. "Each time we wanted modifications, we'd have to bring in consultants to change the code, which ends up being costly and time-consuming," Houghton says.

Solit was briefed to provide a flexible integration framework that would enable easy customisation of the interfaces and mappings between systems by internal IT staff to meet the legal, business and trading requirements that SunChemical encounters in the various countries it operates in. Requirements included:

• .         Improved scalability, enabling the system to cope easily as new sites and additional databases are added.

• .         Enabling Coda to communicate with more than one Protean or Avantis database at a time.

• .         Enabling the integration system to be run over a wide area network, or using the Internet if necessary.

• .         Enabling one instance of Protean and/or Avantis to communicate with two or more Coda databases.

The completion of the first phase of the financial integration objective involved the construction of a basic BizTalk framework consisting of an administrative console, enabling user-friendly management of the interfaces and the BizTalk-specific configuration such as XML data definitions, application integration components, data mappings and orchestration schedules.

Real-time and historical drill-back options are enabled through special repositories with built-in audit trails. For example, project managers now have the ability to drill back and view source data from financials to discover how specific sums were derived. A sales and marketing repository gives users the option of deciding what information they want and the ability to drill back to see where those figures came from.

"The main benefit is that we now have reliable and timely, auditable financial data," says Houghton. "Solit's design has given us a powerful tool that we can tweak and tune. The console is easy to use and enables our integration administrators to control the set-up and execution of the system. Changes that would have taken weeks now take hours or days at most."

Houghton says the second phase of the project is mainly comprised of wish-list items, but the main priorities were addressed in phase one.

"We have enjoyed working with Solit. We consider their technical and management skills to be first rate. What impressed us was that Solit was able to implement a well-engineered technical solution which meets our challenging requirements and at the same time determine a best-of-breed solution using a new cutting-edge technology such as BizTalk Server," concludes Houghton.

"The SunChemical project is a first step in our mission to become a leading global Microsoft BizTalk integration partner," says Francois de Klerk, chairman of Solit. "Microsoft BizTalk Server enables companies moving into the e-business arena to protect their investment in existing systems by enabling the integration of e-business systems with legacy and ERP applications, an area where there is huge opportunity. The project also matches our international strategy to become a leading provider of self-developed e-business products and solutions. We've proved once again that our South African intellectual property can compete on an equal footing with the best the world has to offer," concludes De Klerk.