Longo Brothers Fruit Markets Inc.
Retailer Longo’s rings up efficiency with BizTalk Server 2006
|
|
Company Overview
From its humble beginnings as a family-owned fruit and produce market more than a half century ago, Longo Brothers Fruit Markets Inc. (Longo’s) has become a highly regarded family-owned Canadian supermarket retailer. It currently operates 15 Toronto area locations along with a head office in Mississauga, Ontario. Members of the Longo family still visit the Ontario food terminal each morning to purchase the fresh produce they carry in their stores. To provide customers with the convenience of grocery shopping from home, Longo’s acquired Grocery Gateway, a 24 hours a day, seven days a week online grocery delivery service.
Business Challenge
Over the years, Longo’s has delivered the highest possible customer service and value by employing the best store-front and back office operations. After recently upgrading its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the company realized that building an integration platform for its nine critical applications – which included the ERP system, point-of-sale (POS) and warehouse and inventory management systems – would improve services and reduce costs.
According to John Charleson, Director, Information Technology and Supply Chain Management for Longo’s, the existing infrastructure made it difficult to streamline data exchange between applications, which made many important business processes inefficient. For instance, placing and receiving orders from vendors was a time-consuming process that required staff to manually input data in several different applications. The company envisioned a more automated system, where a purchase order is created in the company ERP system and automatically sent to the vendor. When the order arrives at a Longo’s distribution centre, the warehouse management system automatically logs the shipment and sends a receipt back to the ERP system.
“We run numerous systems, and did not have a flexible integration platform for streamlined, multi-application data exchange. It was chaotic in terms of data management from one system to another, which meant we were missing out on opportunities to improve important services,” says Charleson.
Longo’s discovered that combining different systems into effective business processes was a challenging task. Application integration in its existing system was based on point-to-point vendor-driven integration interfaces, which were costly to implement, repair or modify. The point-to-point integration system was so unreliable that the Longo’s team spent about 40 per cent of its timing addressing it. To solve its integration woes, Longo’s wanted to implement a more flexible integration platform based on service-oriented architecture (SOA).
|
Solution
To deliver such a system, Longo’s enlisted the help of Whitecap Canada Inc. The MicrosoftTM Certified Gold Partner conducted a thorough evaluation to assess Longo’s needs and determined that MicrosoftTM BizTalkTM Server 2006 would be the best fit for Longo’s IT integration goals. The software offered tight integration with Microsoft Visual StudioTM 2005 Team System, which its IT team was already using.
As a business process management (BPM) solution, BizTalk 2006 acts as an integration hub for disparate applications. Data can be easily shuttled between applications via BizTalk and its XML-based messaging and orchestration engine. This is a much more efficient and cost effective system than the point-to-point approach to integration that Longo’s was using previously. Under the old system, Longo’s worked with vendors to develop custom code for every application-to-application interface it wanted, and would consult with them whenever changes were needed.
“Longo’s needed a more agile system than the point to point connections it was relying on which were making it challenging and time-consuming to interact with their ERP and POS vendors. For example, only one vendor would be able to pick up any data changes. If another vendor partner wanted to connect into the system, we were required to create a whole new interface,” explains Zico Sarmento, Solutions Architect / Business Project Manager, Whitecap Canada Inc.
Built on the .NET Framework 2.0, Longo’s implemented BizTalk Server 2006 based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that treats services as components that work together to accomplish business goals. Via the use of Web services adapters, transactions can be connected between the various systems – enabling users to better monitor running processes, interact with trading partners, and perform other business-oriented tasks.
The SOA-based technology enables the Longo’s IT team to create more loosely connected interfaces between its systems, versus the more hard-coded point-to-point connections it used in the past. This data can then be staged and connected between new and existing systems without losing any of its configurations. The end result is a more flexible business transaction system, with quicker response times. For example, a price change for an item only requires processing once, because the information is pulled from Longo’s ERP system and then staged by BizTalk’s Web services adapters for use by other vendors in the retail process.
Not only does BizTalk Server 2006 improve business efficiencies through a more flexible architecture, it also employs a unified IT management console, which provides the Longo’s IT team with a single-window view for monitoring business processes, instead of multiple document queues. This gives the team a better sense of system load times and the interfaces that are currently running. As a result, the team can identify when the system is busy, or has been suspended, allowing them to manage connections better, monitor RAM and improve overall system efficiency.
Business Benefits
Automated business processes
With BizTalk Server 2006, Longo’s is finally able to implement automated business processes that improve operating efficiency, cut costs and reduce errors. The company realized its vision of establishing an automated ordering-receiving system and is establishing similar systems throughout the company.
For example, in the past, batch retail changes – which include cost changes, item description changes and the addition or delisting of products, would take up to seven hours to generate and be processed. This was typically done by an administrator at the end of day, so as to not overwhelm the system. With BizTalk Server 2006, changes are now inputted automatically in the company’s new ERP system and can be made at any time of the day. BizTalk recognizes such changes and provides the information to the POS system in real-time, enabling the company to ensure consistent and accurate pricing and inventory availability across all locations.
“We can now identify sale items in the ERP system and not have to worry about how to transfer the change to the POS systems in each retail location. BizTalk helps us move transactional data across the company, ensuring the POS is driving it to the stores. This means we can avoid the time-consuming task of manually compiling data and focus on making timelier and advantageous business decisions, including staying ahead of competitor pricing in real-time,” says Charleson.
Flexible integration platform
Previously, Longo’s had an average of about eight different item interfaces processing transactions. This created time-consuming and inaccurate business processes. If one of the interfaces failed, there was the possibility to make the wrong business decisions because of it. By basing its SOA solution on BizTalk Server Longo’s has enabled the use of modular systems that can be added and removed as needed. This eliminates the costly and cumbersome point-to-point connections that once existed between several of the Longo’s applications.
“With BizTalk Longo’s has the ability to quickly and easily introduce new applications into its IT environment without worrying about building a custom integration point,” says Sarmento. “It is basically a plug-and-play approach to integration, with BizTalk acting as the hub for all applications. This is a much more flexible and cost-effective approach.”
A foundation for future innovation
The Longo’s IT team is working on incorporating each of its main enterprise applications into similar business process models. In the near future, one such system will provide the business unit with real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) into transactions initiated in Grocery Gateway.
“We have developed a SOA-based integration platform using BizTalk that provides real-time business capabilities. In the future this will allow us to transact orders from Grocery Gateway immediately which will ultimately help us deliver better customer service. Our storekeepers can start pulling orders right away for online customers, rather than waiting for batched orders to be processed the next day,” says Charleson.
The solution will also provide the Longo’s team with further visibility into how each business process is operating through Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). With the help of BAM features in BizTalk, the business unit will be able to see very precise details at each point in the process, including how many orders are being fulfilled at a particular store.
“We plan to leverage BizTalk Server and SOA in several ways in the future to drive our business,” says Charleson. “The features in the tool allow us to easily customize the integration process so we can automate the exchange of transaction data with our retail systems, monitor and adapt business processes to stay ahead of the competition and maintain the high-level of service our customers are accustomed to.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Whitecap Canada Inc products and services, call 416-490-9900 or visit the Web site at: www.whitecapcanada.com
For more information about Longo Brothers Fruit Markets Inc. products and services, call 905-673-3099 or visit the Web site at: www.longos.com
