Westcoast Business Goals
Boomi EDI Integration has revolutionized Westcoast’s business operations, paving the way for seamless B2B transactions and fostering stronger partnerships with their trading partners. They distribute some of the best-known global IT brands to resellers, retailers, and other organizations in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. They have grown to become the number one UK distributor for many of their vendors and customers. As they move progressively beyond traditional IT distribution to fulfillment, cloud enablement, configuration, enhanced logistics, merchandising, and marketing of a wide range of products, they want to demonstrate that all such services are delivered with the flexibility and energy for which Westcoast is renowned.
As our client’s business grew, they recognized the significance of investing in an integration platform to expedite the creation of B2B/EDI transactions. Their objective was to design and deploy an integration-focused EDI solution in collaboration with a trusted partner. This would enable them to effortlessly onboard new customers with minimal manual intervention while ensuring flawless support for various document types and formats.
Technology Challenge
Following are the key challenges faced by Westcoast,
- Analyzing the existing B2B transaction model to determine the optimal approach for transitioning to the desired TO-BE state was a key step. Westcoast faced a significant challenge due to the large volume of customers, vendors, and suppliers they engaged with, coupled with the lack of uniformity in their current AS-IS operational model.
- Multitude formats of data exchange. Trading partners used XML, JSON, EDIFACT, Flat Files, PDF and more.
- Different types of documents exchanged included invoices, orders, purchase orders, acknowledgements, despatch notifications and more.
- Transformation and connectivity to the Westcoast ERP platform. All the documents need to be processed in and out of their ERP platform in a seamless fashion.
- Validation of incoming data and highlighting the errors so that business teams could resolve the issues in a timely manner without impacting the end-to-end business process.
How NeosAlpha Helped
NeosAlpha EDI consultants were quick to understand the needs of Westcoast and recommend Boomi EDI as the the ideal choice for its flexibility, scalability, and extensive support for various EDI formats and communication methods. Based on previous successful engagements for various clients building B2B Integration with Boomi, we are confident that following key goals of any thriving business would be met by Boomi iPaaS.
- Accelerated Onboarding of partners
- Enhanced B2B Transaction Transparency
- Seamless Integration with ERP
- Scalability and long-term viability of EDI
Our technical analysts worked closely with Westcoast’s business stakeholders and documented the underlying business processes, partners, and communication methods involved. Westcoast transacts with partners of varying sizes and from different industries. A table of details was produced, mapping the trading partner, document type, data format, frequency, required transformations, etc., which would then be provided to the integration architecture team for creating an optimal EDI architecture.
More than 50 EDI processes were designed and developed in short duration of time. Error handling was designed such that support team receives a notification with relevant details to troubleshoot the problem quickly. Depending on the use case, Boomi’s connectors were employed. For example, in certain cases, it was more appropriate to use a FTP connector to process the inbound files rather than using a standard trading partner connector because the partner did not have native EDI capabilities.
Below table provides a sample of variety of translations performed,
- EDIFACT to XML
- XML to TRADACOMS
- JSON to TXT
- JSON to PDF
And more.
Results
Following are some of the many achievements of Westcoast by leveraging the power of NeosAlpha’s EDI automation,
- The new system efficiently accommodated Westcoast’s growing business needs, seamlessly handling transactions with over 20 trading partners and supporting 50+ B2B transactions.
- The Boomi EDI solution automated and streamlined B2B transactions, resulting in an impressive reduction of manual intervention by over 60%, and a substantial decrease in processing time by approximately 40%.
- In case of any errors, they get identified and notified immediately to business and technical stakeholders thereby causing no delays or loss of business that led to enhanced customer and partner relations.
