A system developed by Solit for Sun Chemical Corporation, the world's largest manufacturer of printing inks and organic pigments, will enable the company to process orders between different divisions within the organisation, different companies within the same division and between external trading partners and the company.
The value of the deal was $140 000 (around R1.4 million). Development was done by the South African office of Solit for the client, headquartered in New Jersey, US.
The locally developed Cross Site Order Processing (XSOP) system uses Microsoft's BizTalk Server to provide an integration framework that will allow Sun Chemical to integrate disparate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems across selected manufacturing sites, from the more than 300 sites the company owns worldwide.
Hennie Pieters, director of Solit, says the company needed its operations throughout the world to be able to process orders for each other. It designed the framework to allow the ERP systems to connect with each other through adapters.
James Houghton, director of software development, Sun Chemical, says the company needed integration between separate manufacturing systems, both in geographical terms and in terms of potentially disparate packages. All the systems needed to be able to translate and transmit customer orders, shipments and receipt of order.
Previously, Pieters says, if a customer phoned a sales office, for example, the order would be taken down and faxed or phoned through to a manufacturing plant, where it would be captured into the ERP system and processed. If a customer phones in now, the order is captured in the sales office and, using BizTalk, it is automatically sent as an XML document to the manufacturing plant for processing. The XSOP system tracks the status of the order and notifies all parties involved of the status of the order.
"The advantage, from a business perspective, is that it automates the transfer of information and there is no manual capturing of data. The extensible architecture of the XSOP system means that even customers can now place orders electronically in their own format. Using the BizTalk Mapper, a document-mapping feature, the customer's order is easily transformed into an XSOP order as an XML document and processed by the XSOP system. An order can thus be easily processed between a customer and the sales office, the sales office and the manufacturing plant, or Sun Chemical and its suppliers," says Pieters.
The XSOP system can also handle specific data feeds from other companies, so Sun Chemical can manufacture products on their behalf to their specifications, says Houghton.
He says the benefits Sun anticipates deriving from the system include saving time and reducing errors during data entry and co-ordination of information between sites. The aim is for one manufacturing site to be able to fulfil an order seamlessly for another. On receipt of a customer order, the site can manufacture the product and then ship it to another for delivery to the client.
For some manufacturing sites, efficiencies can be realised by delegating manufacturing to another site. With this technology, external customer orders can be processed quickly and efficiently, regardless of whether the local site or a delegated remote site handles the order, says Houghton. Pieters says: "The expectation is that the system will improve delivery times and customer service due to the online availability of the order status."
He says the system testing was completed at the Sun Chemical European Technical Support Centre (ETSC) in Watford, UK in April, without any major hitches. The system has been handed over to Sun Chemical, so it could commence making changes to its systems and deploy it internally. Initially the plan is for the system to be used in Europe, with the first implementation in the Netherlands and Belgium offices. However, it could be taken worldwide, says Pieters.
Houghton says Sun chose Solit because it had worked with the provider on similar projects. "Solit has lots of experience with Microsoft BizTalk. It has the right knowledge to deal with these tools and technologies, so it was a logical fit."
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