The Challenge
Remedi’s client, a global leader in infrastructure solutions for communications networks, acquired a division of another global organization. The acquisition tripled their existing trading partner relationships overnight from 70 to more than 225, and the acquired company was growing rapidly.
Remedi's client quickly realized their legacy integration and EDI platform was not robust enough to keep pace with the growth or able to support the new requirements requested by the new relationships they had acquired with the purchase.
Their new trading partner relationships required the ability to scale quickly to not only support EDI integration but also enterprise application integration or EAI. Transaction volume would also increase drastically, almost 225% monthly. Plus, new integration requirements from the additional trading partners, like application to application, A2A, integration and direct connect and web services capabilities were too much for their legacy solutions to support. They needed to look at a new, modern, best of breed integration solution that could support the myriad of new trading partner requirements, volume growth, and integration capabilities required of their new integration environment.
The Solution
Remedi's client selected IBM® Sterling B2B Integrator solution and the Remedi Framework; Remedi’s companion product for B2B Integrator. After a great deal of research, they chose Sterling Integrator because it has the capabilities to support all their needs in an integration environment not only for the short term but also for the long term.
The Sterling Integrator software provides them the capability to integrate complex B2B/EDI processes with their partner communities. It provides a single, flexible B2B platform that supports all of their required communication protocols, helps secure their B2B network, and achieve high availability operations. Sterling Integrator helped them reduce costs by consolidating to a single B2B platform and automating their B2B processes across enterprises.
The Remedi Framework extends the capabilities of B2B Integrator and allows for additional visibility to their data to enhance the functionality of B2B Integrator out of the box. Remedi’s Framework solution includes libraries of pre-built, parameter-driven business processes, dashboards, reports, and other components that provide a flexible, scalable, and reusable integration architecture. It also allows for a faster deployment of Sterling Integrator leading to a quicker ROI on the investment in Sterling Integrator.
Remedi provided the client with the EDI consulting talent and services required to implement, deploy, and support the global integration environment. We gave the client peace of mind that their new integration environment would support their integration needs and scale to support long-term integration initiatives.
The Results
Simplified processes
By implementing B2B Integrator with the Remedi Framework, the client deployed the software four times faster than a traditional deployment, simplified management and administration, reduced the need for custom business processes, and enjoyed the end to end document visibility.
Improved customer relationships
Besides enhancing new trading partner relationships and fostering improved customer satisfaction, implementation times for trading partner onboarding were greatly reduced.
Three-year ROI of $4.5 million
The client also achieved a three-year return on investment of over $4.5 million due to their new integration environment based on Sterling Integrator and the Remedi Framework. The client considers their merger of two integration environments to be a complete success and continues to work with Remedi to constantly improve its integration environment by exploring and implementing complementary IBM solutions to add to its environment.
