In the next several weeks, I will be writing about some of our projects and how we were able to assist companies with their EDI and data integration challenges.
The first project I will outline was done for a regional health insurance company that serves more than 880,000 members in 32 counties.
Client Challenge
Although the client had installed IBM’s Sterling B2B Integrator 4.2 (formerly known as Gentran Integration Suite) in 2007, all the communications, compression/decompression, encryption/decryption had been handled through Unix scripting. The scheduling and the e-mail notifications had been handled through mainframe jobs. It had been very tough and time consuming to create and maintain the scripts as well as monitor and re-process jobs if needed. There were too many possible points of failure and the scripts became difficult to maintain.
Our Solution
Our solution was to streamline the communications process by utilizing the gateway available in Sterling B2B Integrator. We would develop templates and train the employees to understand, duplicate, and modify the templates. These templates would be the basis to convert the 80+ Unix scripts that currently existed.
The Results
The Unix scripts and mainframe processing was replaced with Sterling B2B Integrator business processes which now handled scheduling and email notifications as well as the compress/decompress, encrypt/decrypt file functions. In addition, FTPS and SFTP protocols were added to meet trading partner requirements. File organization was improved by utilizing gateway mailboxes to handle different file processes and restart capabilities were added to easily reprocess data.
Techy stuff…
- Hardware(and OS): Unix
- Software(and version): Sterling Integrator v4.2
- ERP: Peoplesoft, Trizetto
- Number of trading partners: 50+
- Number of business processes: 60+
To learn more about this project in detail, please contact us. To learn more about our Sterling B2B Integrator services, please read our product page.
