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Master the Balancing Act: Cost-Effective and Scalable Data Integration

Featuring valued customer

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About Griffin Technology

• Company founded in 1992, Privately held

• One of the world's foremost creators of accessories for home, mobile, and personal technology.

• All products are conceived, designed, and developed in-house and continue to push the envelope of the industry they helped create.

• Began making Macintosh monitor adapters, continued growth in consumer electronics market, launched into retail boom with iPod accessories in 2005

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Issues

• Pre-EDI– Could not handle large order volume (Direct To Store)– Lack of customer communication (no ASN)– 1500 orders a month– Web solutions provided by each trading partner– One website per partner

• Webforms limitations– Manual rekey (no integration)– Potential for mistakes high

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Global Requirements

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Retail locations reaching six continents increased requirements and complexities.

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Customer Compliance

• Electronic Data Interchange– Purchase Orders– Invoices– Advance Ship Notices– Functional Acknowledgements– SSCC Barcode labels

• Challenges– Guidelines change regularly and companies have issues

keeping up with the changes.– Charge-backs

• Considerations– Little or no installation/configuration– Low upfront costs and total cost of ownership– Rapid implementations

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Manage Your Business

• Liaison Technologies offers a variety of platform and on-premise products to assist organizations meet initial trading partner compliance requirements and architect large scale middleware infrastructures.

• The goal of implementations large and small is to make incremental, re-usable investments in technology to reduce costs and meet customer demands.

• A team of integration and EDI experts delivers all the support required to maintain your system allowing you to focus on core competencies, not EDI.

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B2B Integration Platforms and Products

Enterprise Application Integration

Data Exchange Platform

Athena Supplier Web

Delta & ECS Enterprise

Delta

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Liaison Product Evolution at Griffin

• Vista• Forms based EDI• Barcode printing

Trading Partner Compliance

• ECS & Delta• Communication and

process automation• Data translation

Integrated EDI• ECS & Delta

Enterprise• Scalable platform• Web service platform

for internal integration

Enterprise Application Integration

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Forms Based EDI

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Athena makes the viewing, creation, and exchange of EDI documents as easy as e-mail. New messages arrive in the Inbox and sent messages live in the Sent folder.

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Forms Based EDI: TPK

• When you create or reply to an EDI document in Athena, the appropriate TPK is invoked and an attractive form displays

• Athena compares the data in your outgoing EDI document to your trading partner’s specification.

• Automated functional acknowledgment generation

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Forms Based EDI: Barcode Printing

• Create and print bar code labels right from Athena.

• The printed bar codes match the bar code numbers that are sent with your advance ship notices, allowing your trading partners to cross reference shipments when they arrive.

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Forms Based EDI: Document Management

• Quickly locate any type of message (e-mail or EDI) across your entire account using Athena’s broad keyword search field

• Export the raw EDI document, forward it as an attachment, or translate to a flat-file format

• Use the built-in reporting module report module to quickly summarize a variety of EDI activities such as:– EDI documents that have not yet been acknowledged by your

trading partners– All sent or received EDI documents

• Configure Athena to alert via e-mail, the arrival of a new EDI document

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Drivers• Time consuming process to

input inbound and outbound documents

• Higher transactional volume and number of trading partners

• Data quality suffered due to manual entry

Objectives• Provide on-premise platform

for development of all current and future trading partner requirements

• Direct FTP and AS2 communications with trading partners

• Event and scheduled based processes

• Enable enterprise level reporting and monitoring

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Integration

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Delta: Mapping Interface

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Delta supports both source- and target-driven mapping through simple drag and drop and sophisticated function based rules.

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Delta: Testing and Debugging

• The Diagnostic pane logs the details of the test run, alerting you to any errors that were encountered

• Output Files pane displays the temporary file(s) that were created as a result of the test run

• View source data and Delta’s current position within it

• Stepping through one or more of the remaining rules one at a time

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Integration: ECS

• Data flow in ECS is governed by input channels, output channels, and event rules

• Components are configured from ECS’ Management Console utility

• Typically, event rules are tied to input channels, telling ECS what to do with data when it arrives

• System-defined exceptions, user-defined data exceptions, and user-defined Delta exceptions can be defined to notify administrators when errors or conditions are met.

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Major ERP – How and Why

• Problems with existing small ERP system– Limited integration (no direct database access)– Major performance issues– Order entry bottleneck – 1,500 orders per month– Limited financial G/L tracking capabilities

• Areas needed for growth– Enhanced external integration capabilities– Financial reporting– Forecasting, MRP/Ordering management

• New ERP system requirements– Scalable, increased performance– Flexible/configurable

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Major ERP - Implementation

• A chance to rebuild and redesign– Rewrite maps from ground up for new backend– On-the-fly new address creation using WebServices/SOAP– Enhanced error checking, duplicate PO check

• The need for real-time integration– Fast order turnaround mandated by Trading Partners– Batch processing greatly minimized. Reduces strain on both

ERP and EDI.

• Ability to scale– ERP is multi-server enterprise level system which EDI system

must continue to grow with.

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An affordable ESB

• ECS and Delta together can be viewed as an Enterprise Service Bus.

• Allows for creative solutions helping to overcome business process mismatches

System 1

System 2

System 3

Trading Partner

Trading Partner

ECS

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Current State

• Stable, scalable environment that provides ability to quickly design and deploy new projects.– 10,000 orders per month– 20% of orders, 80% of revenue– 40 EDI Trading Partners

• New projects– International 3PL Warehouse EDI Integration– Tighter integration with JD Edwards transportation modules

(carrier tracking, ASNs)– PLM System currently being installed. Potential for EDI

integration with manufactures.

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Solutions

• Data Integration• Data Management • Data Security

Multinational

• Global headquarters in Atlanta• European offices in Finland,

Netherlands, Sweden, UK• More than 7000 customers

worldwide in over 46 countries

Visit Griffin Technology here

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Additional Resources