Case Study: Enterprise Resource Planning
The Challenge
JJBuckley is a pioneer in the web-based wine retail market and they made their niche by providing a comparison shopping engine that allowed users to search for wines and compare prices across hundreds of retailers, in addition to buying, selling, and storing wine for trading. They were challenged with an IT modernization initiative when their internally developed custom inventory management system was not capable of managing the market demands for highly complex shipping scenarios and real time inventory management. In other words, the sales growth generated by their updated ecommerce store fronts (i.e JJBuckley.com, SFWTC.com) had outgrown the supply chain management capacity side of the business. A best of breed ERP system (i.e.NetSuite) was selected by the client to address the supply chain management challenges that could be integrated with their best-in-class ecommerce store front. The challenge was that the ERP system-provided standard API integration could not support the necessary data transformation and performance requirements of the client’s business.
The Plan
Select a team of developers who specialize in IT modernization, database integration, and performance analysis to study the NetSuite integration capabilities and provide a solution to the client that could support the advanced shipping requirements, data transformation and performance baselines while staying in compliance with the NetSuite customization tenants.
The Solution
The solution involved utilizing the NetSuite RESTlet framework and building a custom developed .Net framework middleware solution. Using SuiteScript 2.x RESTlet Script Type, all integrations were built to pass the data back and forth between the NetSuite ERP inventory management and the ecommerce website database. The RESTlets were used for initiating all requests from sales, marketing and warehouse employees via NetSuite and for receiving all requests back from the ecommerce system. As NetSuite was the source of truth it was important for the data transformation and synchronization between the two systems to occur in near real time. The standard integration provided by NetSuite was not capable of performing the data transformation in a real time manner, which was a critical requirement. To address this limitation, the bi-directional data migration was achieved utilizing SuiteScript 2.x in conjunction with WebJobs and a middleware component written in the .Net framework using the C# development language.
