Mark Anthony Group
Mark Anthony Group (MAG) Selects BizTalk Server 2004 as the Integration Platform of Choice
|
|
Company Overview
Based in Vancouver, B.C., the Mark Anthony Group (MAG) is a privately held manufacturer and distributor of premium wines and alcoholic beverages. Its brands include Mike's Hard Lemonade, which has become the number one brand in its category and is largely responsible for the company's phenomenal growth over the last several years. With revenues in excess of CDN $400 million per year, MAG's primary markets are the United States and Canada.
With offices, production and distribution centers scattered across Canada and the U.S., MAG is reliant on a team of external partners to produce, distribute and sell its products. The organization works with nine distribution centers and eight co-packers throughout the product life cycle.
Business Challenge
“Effectively what we have is a number of partners in their supply and demand chain. On the supply side, there are raw materials providers, which supply the glass, sugar and the raw ingredients that make up its product. As well, we also have our co-packers – which effectively are the assembly line who put together Mike’s Hard Lemonade and ship it out to their distribution centers,” says Mihai Strusievici, Manager, Systems Development, MAG.
With so many partners involved at different stages of the production cycle, MAG’s executives needed a better way to get an up-to-date snapshot of all operations. From a sales and marketing perspective, MAG found it difficult to forecast demand because of the amount of disparate data that it received from its raw materials providers and co-packers. Out of date data, operational inefficiencies, and lack of data integration were starting to impact the bottom line and impeding the executive team’s decision making abilities.
“Many of our trading partners have their own ERP or similar systems to manage their businesses. When they are working on our projects, they are duplicating work by entering data into their systems and then entering data into our ERP system which we host for them at their location,” says Strusievici. “Human error was creeping into the equation with the repetition of work and we were finding it hard to access the data as quickly as we would have liked. The general framework to exchange data was making it difficult to work with our partners in an efficient and timely manner.”
With so many different suppliers and partners in place throughout the production process, MAG was in need of a platform that could communicate with systems that were much different from its proprietary systems.
|
Solution
MAG In order to meet their organizational requirements, MAG selected BizTalk® Server 2004, part of the Windows Server™ Operating System, as the integration platform to standardize its operating procedures and business transactions on.
Selecting the Right Partners
To meet its growing business goals, MAG turned to Microsoft Certified Partner Sunaptic Solutions Incorporated to develop an integration solution that would meet its objectives. Having worked with Sunaptic on previous integration projects, the team felt confident that the partner would bring the right solution to the table to help its business grow. Sunaptic Solutions is focused on integration technologies and the joining together of business and technology.
Sunaptic’s focus in the integration and business process automation field has led to its use of BizTalk Server within multiple customer deployments. Working together, MAG and Sunaptic decided to deploy BizTalk Server 2004. Part of the Windows Server System, Microsoft® BizTalk Server 2004 helps customers to efficiently and effectively integrate systems, employees and trading partners and help improve their time to value.
“We have been working with MAG for quite some time, particularly in the areas of business integration and business process automation. MAG was faced with integration challenges internally between its ERP, CRM and home grown systems as well as externally with its partners and co-packers,” says Jame Healy, Senior Solutions Architect, Sunaptic Systems. “The decision to deploy BizTalk Server 2004 is part of a strategic move to utilize the Microsoft platform and maximize the organization’s goal to utilize the .NET framework.”
Meeting Supply and Demand
Working together with multiple suppliers results in a great deal of data being transferred back and forth. Initial attempts to improve communication between systems involved MAG providing their suppliers with ERP terminals at each distribution center. The costs of supporting these systems and the concern over human error creeping into the equation led the management team at MAG to select BizTalk Server 2004 as the best platform for integration.
The organization was impressed with the enhanced integration with Visual Studio® .NET development system. BizTalk Server 2004 provides an integrated development environment built on Visual Studio .NET. It ensures developers can quickly design business processes that cross heterogeneous applications and technologies. BizTalk Server 2004 offered MAG enhanced document transformation services, enabling the organization to transform data between dramatically different formats used by different business applications and trading communities such as Rosetta, XML and EDI.
“BizTalk’s tighter integration with .NET will make a real difference to Mark Anthony’s ability to communicate with their co-packers and partners in a much more efficient manner. They will be able to leverage existing code libraries that have already been developed internally or through third-party sources,” says Healy.
Developing a Uniform Integration Platform
In addition to communicating electronically with its partners, MAG was also struggling to manage and update the various point to point homegrown solutions that it had developed to connect disparate islands of data internally. The deployment of BizTalk Server 2004 will provide the organization with a uniform integration platform to connect data residing in different silos.
BizTalk Server 2004 will allow MAG to integrate their ERP system, MFG/PRO from QAD, with other data residing in SQL Server™ and their Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution. The business processes within the product will enable the organization to automate and orchestrate interactions in a highly flexible, highly automated manner quickly and cost-effectively.
“The BizTalk solution will allow for the flow of information with other line of business applications and proprietary internally developed solutions. For instance, mikesharddistributor.com is the site that distributors log onto to place orders and is based on a SQL Server and ASP.NET platform, and the system is continually being fed information from MFG/PRO,” says Healy.
“We were faced with the reality that our point to point applications were eroding over time. Keeping up to date with changes was difficult. BizTalk is providing us with a uniform business integration platform that will improve our overall business agility and flexibility,” says Strusievici.
For More Information
For more information about the partner, call Sunaptic SolutionsPhone: (604) 543-9093 or visit www.sunaptic.com
Business Benefits
Immediately Low Overhead and Reduced Complexity
For MAG, the rollout of BizTalk Server 2004 will have a low impact on business processes from a human perspective. The toolset reduces the complexity and cost of integration by offering reduced maintenance costs, increased benefit to business users and increase employee satisfaction. The BizTalk platform will reduce the amount of custom development required, placing less burdens on developers within the IT department.
The single integrated development environment allows MAG to develop integration solutions far faster using the skill set that they are familiar with. Further, it reduces the initial cost and time of application and trading partner integration, while simplifying the subsequent maintenance of the integration solution.
“The BizTalk solution will provide MAG with low impact on their business and IT department. Typically, with this type of integration, some form of interface or application is added into the application mix. Our whole concept is to keep it simple,” says Healy. “The BizTalk solution adds value by providing organizations with low overhead and low impact on their IT department and the end users.”
Cost Savings
One area that MAG will be able to see the most benefits is raw materials usage. Prior to deploying BizTalk, the organization was unable to estimate or track over consumption of their raw materials. As many co-packers package multiple products in their facilities, it was difficult for the organization to track how much of their raw materials were used in MAG’s end product.
Now, MAG will have the ability to accurately view real-time data to know if raw materials such as sugar, were used by the co-packer in Mike’s Hard Lemonade or if it was going somewhere else and making it into another product.
“We quickly realized the type of business value that the BizTalk Solution would bring to the table. The ability to analyze data to identify any possible overages happening off-site at our co-packer locations, or the division of raw materials into different brands that they are also producing will help our organization to reduce costs and improve the bottom line,” says Strusievici.
Increased Flexibility
Using the flexible architecture of BizTalk Sever 2004, MAG will be better able to react quickly to market shifts that demand process changes. Further, by using the .NET framework and Web Services, the organization will be able to communicate with partners faster, providing them with enhanced agility and flexibility. This enhanced flexibility will enable the organization to forecast demand and act accordingly in an efficient manner.
“The architecture of BizTalk Server 2004 enables us to communicate with suppliers and distributors that are using systems that are radically different from those that we house internally. The ability for our ERP system to integrate and share data will help us to save on the costs associated with supporting our systems at partners sites as well as the reducing the chance that data may not be entered into our systems,” says Strusievici. “The flexibility of the .NET architecture means that we are now able to extend beyond our enterprise and communicate in real-time with our partners.”
“BizTalk 2004 is providing MAG with a lot more visibility into their operations,” says Healy. “The organization will be able to view inordinate amount of demand as a result of a car racing event or concert, and they will actually be able to start planning ahead of time, rather than react by picking up the phone and producing an emergency shipment,” says Healy.
