The Client
The client is leading manufacturer of high-quality controls, application heads, melting and dosing systems. The company offers sustainable adhesive application solutions for industrial hot-melt and cold-glue applications to customers in 80 countries.
The Challenge
The client has experienced significant growth in the past because of several mergers and acquisitions. This led to a landscape of disconnected systems resulting in inconsistency in data and information management making it difficult to have a unified view of the business. The company had over eight ERPs that needed to be connected in real-time to a single CRM and the headquarters ERP. The company needed a very flexible and highly scalable solution along with a reliable and experienced partner to resolve current hurdles and pave the way for future growth.
Additionally, the client’s complex pricing structure based on multiple regional factors caused a challenge as stakeholders needed real-time information. The company faced challenges in effectively and efficiently managing pricing due to factors such as product regional location, payment terms, incoterms, and specific offers. Moreover, industry dynamics and challenges were adding to the complexities faced by the manufacturing leader. To stay ahead of the competition, the company needed to accelerate time to market and reduce integration maintenance expenses.
The Solution
The client turned to Persistent, seeking a robust, composable, and reusable integration architecture that was highly scalable and flexible to meet their needs. Our successful implementation of Sales Cloud and MC Account Engagement across multiple regions for the company helped us earn their trust. Building on our 5-year strong relationship, we worked with the client teams to create an IT ecosystem that could be interconnected with every internal system, spanning from lead management to account, from the opportunity to quote with ERP pricing, from quote to order to invoice, from customer work orders and agent allocation to service appointment planning.
We offered a comprehensive set of solutions by leveraging the power of MuleSoft’s out-of-the-box features. We implemented a robust repository-based release management system to enforce industry best practices for release and source code management. This solution empowered the client to efficiently oversee their code and releases, enhancing overall productivity and reliability.
Persistent implemented a scalable and composable solution to interconnect the ERPs and Salesforce. This involved creating a set of System APIs to interface different APplus, Navision, and SAP ByD instances. We also developed a set of Process APIs to sync and manage transaction data for customer data, work orders, invoices, products, pricing, and additional reference data.
We added a real-time pricing feature in Salesforce, allowing users to explore product pricing through a product tree in the Salesforce UI. It was made possible by real-time calls to an Experience API exposed by MuleSoft.
To ensure reliability, we implemented monitoring solutions for the MuleSoft logic, which notify stakeholders of errors and batch outcomes.
Although we enabled the client to scale twice by increasing the vCores, our roadmap includes increasing the composability thanks to MuleSoft’s new features with CloudHub 2.1, which will help optimise resources further.
The Outcomes
The manufacturing company reaped significant benefits. The frequency of syncs has increased from daily to nearly real-time, ensuring the availability of real-time pricing. This has allowed users to conveniently navigate product pricing by using a more intuitive Salesforce UI, enabling the client to stay competitive in the market.
The solutions’ composable architecture has enabled the client to significantly reduce the possible 30+ point-to-point integrations to just five. This has improved the system’s efficiency and helped save time and resources.
Moreover, the solutions have seamlessly integrated more than 15 objects into 8 different systems, bolstering the company’s overall productivity and workflow. The composable integration has been optimised to ensure seamless integration, reducing integration maintenance costs by up to 50%.
The company also improved error management and monitoring to decrease the number of ticket generation. Furthermore, reducing go-to-market time for ERP integration from 8 to 2 months has helped the company meet market demands quickly. These impressive advancements not only ensure a seamless experience for their customers but also position the brand as a leading player in the industry.
Technology Used
- MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
- MuleSoft CloudHub
- Salesforce CRM
- Navision
- SAP byD
- APplus
