ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION

RETAIL
Customer: Large Retail Chain in US
Technology: Enterprise Application Integration

The Customer

The Customer is a leading retail and food distributor among the top 12 food retailers in the United States with over a thousand retail stores, including hundreds of licensed locations across several states. It caters to over 1100 stores of varying sizes which represent regional and national chain supermarkets, corporate-owned and licensed retail locations, mass merchandisers and e-tailers.

The Challenge

With its huge network of stores and retail outlets, our customer was in need of a web-based order management system that would allow retailers to place orders over the web and track the status of each order.

The customer's current application aggregated the orders in a DB2 database. The application resided on a legacy mainframe system. The retailer would place his order, which was reviewed by the customer and sent to the distributor. The distribution centers would ship the orders to the retailers. This entire process was long and led to delays and reduced efficiency. The customer felt the need for an online system.

The Solution

Tata Infotech developed a system from scratch. It gathered the customer's requirements, drew out a detailed design, developed the system and tested it. The eMerchandising system integrates with the Customer's existing applications and is based on the Web Commerce Suite (WCS) framework from IBM. The system incorporates other technologies like VA4J, IBM WebSphere Application server, IBM HTTP server, JSP, EJB and DB2 Connect to link to the mainframe database.

The Benefits

The new system provides retailers with an additional ordering channel.

Meanwhile real-time data entry and insight enables clients to optimize their total requirement.

The Testimonial

The IT Manager of the Customer firm said: "The first thing TATA did for me was to take over support of the eCatalog application developed by IBM ... They completed the enhancement backlog in less than 2 months. They cut the
reported problems to less than 1 per month. They assumed support responsibility for eMerchanding and for Common Code Web. They can support Dock Scheduling and other Web applications if required. The two resources are onsite if needed for support but are able to spend most of their time on other development projects."

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