Posted by:
invenioLSI
Publish Date:
9 May, 2022
Redington Gulf is one of the world’s leading end-to-end supply chain solution providers, working with manufacturing businesses across the globe to deliver dynamic and scalable services at every stage. Their worldwide distribution networks mean that Redington Gulf are able to provide their solutions to over 100 major brands, including Samsung, Dell, Cisco and Apple, in over 24 countries across the Middle East, Africa, Turkey and the CIS region.
Business Challenges
In recent years, Redington Gulf has seen a huge increase in the number of business channels they were utilising, and as a result, various applications had been built internally to cater to individual vendor needs. But every one of these applications was created within a silo, making universal management incredibly challenging and limiting their ability to utilise applications for other solutions. When Redington Gulf first got in touch with the team at Invenio, they were justifiably concerned that their cumbersome IT infrastructure was hindering their success, growth and future expansion.
A legacy of ad hoc application development. Thanks to their previous approach of developing applications in an ad hoc, siloed manner, Redington Gulf were struggling with ongoing maintenance for each one. Not only were they unable to manage them as a single group, but they were struggling with multiple duplication errors for each new supplier and an extremely high maintenance cost. They needed to achieve a faster, more efficient process to ensure that service delivery always met their high standards.
High data transfer demands. Along with an increase in supplier demands, Redington Gulf were also experiencing a huge increase in the volume of business data from each vertical. All of this data needed to be transferred from the ERP system into reporting applications, and their current systems were struggling under the load. To achieve a faster, more accurate transfer of this data, they needed a more unified development system to be created, along with a full re-architecting of the applications to allow efficient communication.
High maintenance costs. Up until now, Redington Gulf’s systems had no re-usable elements at all, and multiple point to point connections to various external systems. Because of the complexity and size of this system, there was no single source for maintenance, instead forcing each element to be updated individually. This lead to incredibly high maintenance costs and a long maintenance cycle.
Slow development. Without any re-usable services in place, new application development was incredibly slow, with an average timescale of 16 weeks from concept to finished application. This made the on-boarding process for new channel partners and vendors tedious and time consuming, as they had to wait for their applications to be developed before service could begin. Redington Gulf found that this 16-week wait was causing a lot of damage to their customer relationships and their professional image.
Delays. All of these backend technical issues did not just stay in the backend – they started a chain reaction which manifested in general delays to order processing and increased errors in manual entries – all of which resulted in unhappy customers, delayed or even cancelled orders. Fulfilment and delivery delays meant dissatisfied channel partners and many lost opportunities.
Invenio's Solution
If Redington Gulf wanted to continue to grow and expand into new verticals and on-board more channel partners, they needed a solution that would be fast, resilient, flexible, reusable and capable of handling larger data volumes. Using their extensive industry knowledge and deep understanding of the underlying issues, Invenio built a robust new platform between SAP and their existing business systems using MuleSoft ESB (enterprise service bus). The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) component was built using a blend of EDIFACT and AS2, which enabled Redington Gulf to perform EDI transactions.
This new platform allowed for the unified transformation, aggregation and consolidation of data and interface, creating a completely extendable and scalable landscape that could be added to as the business grew. A consistent and unified application was designed to interface between internal and external users, and the channel partners now using this component are processing thousands of orders every single day, without incident or delay.
The Results
Invenio’s solution was developed and implemented successfully in line with industry standards and best practices, which allowed the system to be extended to any area of the business without issue. There were no major disruptions to service while the upgrade was taking place, and channel partners, vendors and clients were transferred across effortlessly. Redington Gulf now also benefit from:
- Standardised integration of partners like Lenovo, IBM and Redhat. These partners now communicate with Redington Gulf’s ERP systems, which are seamlessly processing orders as they come in using EDI protocol EDIFACT. This system automates the entire process, eliminating the risk of manual errors.
- Much faster order processing. With automated protocols, orders from the partner portal that previously took a full day can be processed in less than a minute.
- An ESB platform that re-uses common services and connectors throughout the system, making the on-boarding of a new partner a simple and easy process. The reusable service design saves a huge amount of money and time, and reducing the new client on-boarding time from 16 weeks to just 6.
- Full end-to-end automation of data provides Redington Gulf with real-time visibility into the status of orders and stock management reports, allowing for a greater level of control and governance.
- Faster credit limits available directly through the partner portal, made possible by high levels of process automation.
- Stock points which are connected in real-time with SAP and gives the full high-level visibility of transactions, all the way to warehouse level.
- A robust new system that is fully compliant with industry standards. It has also effectively removed the risk of any one application or system being the single point of failure for the entire business.