Adjusting to a parent company’s acquisition is a bane for manufacturing firms. To allay the resulting distress, a robust B2B methodology should be in place to manage large and diverse customer networks. The core aim of this methodology should be to boost organizational growth by leveraging existing workforce, maximizing profits, and providing a superior customer experience.
Luckily, today’s market is full of B2B integration tools which help create a strong B2B methodology to deliver results. Adeptia’s Integration Suite is one such tool that has carved a niche by successfully executing B2B integration in manufacturing domain.
Many of B2B integration challenges involve diverse customer communities, silo’d B2B methodologies, over-reliance on IT for management of B2B processes, inadequate or non-existent onboarding strategies, and technological resources without the vision and collaboration required to successfully execute on a B2B strategy.
This is why we’ve launched a new series featuring how Adeptia solves these B2B challenges for our customers. One such example is the way that Adeptia recently helped a manufacturing firm that faced a major challenge in adjusting to a parent company’s acquisition.
As a result of multiple acquisitions and mergers over the years, the manufacturing firm had multiple ERP systems in place, such as Bond, Oracle, and MAPICS. These ERP systems handled parts information, processed orders, managed shipping and manufacturing, etc., and this complicated situation required intensive IT efforts to keep data flowing between the various ERP systems and the firm’s vendors and clients, all of whom used different file formats to transmit information.
Problems escalated exponentially when the manufacturer was bought from the parent company. The manufacturer was given an ultimatum that they had to separate their systems from the parent company’s infrastructure within a certain timeframe and assume responsibility for all integrations and data connectivity. Failure to complete the separation by the set deadline would carry a price tag in the millions.
The manufacturing firm knew what they wanted: a non-technical integration solution that could be managed and maintained by business users rather than IT personnel. They found that solution in Adeptia’s comprehensive Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) designed to integrate any application with any data at any location.
Adeptia employs a “configure, no code” approach, which means that business users can easily configure connections and solutions using convenient wizards. IT executes the initial setup and provides appropriate governance and control, but they are not called upon to perform daily integration and management activities.
Once the company implemented Adeptia’s solution and eliminated the need for custom coding, they were able to streamline integration in order to meet with their parent company’s ultimatum and complete the system separation months ahead of schedule. Not only did they avoid costly penalties, but they also empowered their business users to manage and maintain data connectivity and application integrations. What’s more, the manufacturing firm is now able to leverage a low-maintenance, user-friendly application integration platform for all their partner, vendor, and customer interactions, as well as for their own in-house ERP systems. Thanks to Adeptia, data connectivity is assured, and future integrations can be handled with ease by their business users.