Success project

Data Movement Solution for a worldwide leader in the fast food industry

Abstract

Client is a leading global fast food restaurant chain.

The client wanted to implement a Central Messaging Hub connecting internal applications with external gateways to address its large number of restaurants spread all over Europe.

Therefore the need was to understand and analyze business ' technical requirements, and also to build interfaces for integration using BizTalk as the solution tool aiming to improved performance, Flexibility, Scalability and monitoring of the system.

ACROM had a leading role in the architecture designing, implementation, administration and support for the EAI solution built upon BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and .NET technologies.

Client Description

The client is a fortune 100 company with revenue of over $25 billion annually, a global food services company, with a very large network of restaurants on all five continents.

Data Movement is a very critical business capability for our client because these data sent from the restaurants are routed to Business Intelligence applications, Supply Chain and business partners.

Problem description

For our client its European market had always faced issues because of the diversity and complexity of data sources increased due to the way in which they were submitted to applications like Business Intelligence, Sales, Supply Chain used at corporate level or for communication with business partners.

Given the scale of the project and the fact that the communication infrastructure was outsourced to third parties the chosen EAI solution and platform had to be very flexible, tolerant to changes and addressing the following drawbacks of the old Data Movement solution :

  • New initiatives require changes to many internal applications
  • Difficulty in addressing Business Requirements
  • No Central Messaging Hub - No sharing of common functionality, inability to address cross-gateway requirements
  • Limitations of value addition from a messaging perspective like Message Flow Dashboard and Traffic Analysis

Hence a central Messaging Hub solution connecting internal applications with external gateways was needed to address market growth and business requirements.

Business Drivers and Objectives

Solutia a fost conceputa in jurul ideii de "message hub", acesta constituind un punct focal pentru intreaga comunicatie a aplicatiilor din cadrul companiei cat si pentru cele din afara ei, de la furnizori, distribuitori, etc. S-a urmarit:

  • One Messaging Hub for the entire European Market
  • Message Flow Dashboard and Traffic Analysis
  • Scalability - Seamless integration with new applications
  • Performance
  • Disaster recovery/business continuity
  • Zero Data Loss

ACROM Approach

To develop this solution, we relied on the leaders in the field of EAI - Microsoft and IBM. Messaging Hub utilizes BizTalk Server R2 2006, MSMQ, WebSphere MQ, WCF Web Services,. NET Framework.

  • Initially we developed a pilot project to demonstrate how the BizTalk Server works and how it will solve the problems of integration and workflow
  • Documentation of existing solutions and drafting functional requirements
  • Migrating from existing solution to the new one was done in stages - use technology migration and software deployment functionality of the site to minimize any risk
  • Partnership with Microsoft for testing and benchmarking solution

ACROM Solution

ACROM implemented the Data Movement solution with rich workflow, Business Rules and Integration capabilities leveraging Microsoft BizTalk platform. Following are the highlights of the engagement:

  • Validation of messages passing through the Messaging Hub
  • Message Transformation
  • Message sequencing
  • Unified method of reporting and analysis of traffic
  • Check for duplicate messages
  • Change/expansion of the content of messages
  • Archiving

Benefits to Client

  • Centralized Messaging Hub
  • Consolidarea managementului mesajelor
  • Flexible SOA architecture allows the adoption of new business rules quickly
  • Automation and optimization of business
  • Reduce cost of implementation for new interfaces
  • Reducing end-to-end message transmission time
  • Reconciliation and centralized error correction
  • Reduce TCO due to the BizTalk platform which has a modular structure, a set of predefined adapters, proactive monitoring services
  • Reducing enabling time for a new market, regional office location or for an automatic data transmission