Modern Integration Means Better Data Flow for Distributor

About our client – and an ongoing journey

Our client, a medical and dental supplies company (MDSC), is based in New York State. With more than 25 distribution centers, it ships products around the world. Our original MDSC article involved outdated systems being handled expertly by older, but retiring, employees. MDSC could not attract younger workers for the old systems. Prolifics helped solve that immediate issue by implementing LegaSuite – a tool that acted as a bridge between a MDSC’s existing applications and a user-friendly, web-based interface. It was this initial work that impressed MDSC and secured for Prolifics the integration projects of this next success story. (You can read the original story here.)

Challenge – getting systems to talk to each other

While LegaSuite solved an immediate, pressing issue for specific systems, MDSC still had systems like SAP, various websites and databases, and a number of different windows applications that didn’t necessarily speak to one another – they needed integration. MDSC was doing a lot of integration already, but these efforts usually involved passing files or reading and writing directly from databases.

This type of integration is known as point-to-point integration, that flow individual pieces of data from system to system. For every business use case, where data needs to flow from one system to another, someone would have to hand write code that extracts that specific data from that system and pushes it into another system – and do that for every single integration. This could get up into the hundreds, or even thousands, of these point-to-point integrations, all of which would have to be maintained.

The company wanted a more modern approach to their integration platform, so data would be more readily available, and their business would be more flexible, dynamic and faster.

What we did – the modern world of APIs

The modern approach uses application programming interfaces, or APIs. The API-led approach basically has each system create its own interface that offers its data up for any other system to get it.

MDSC chose MuleSoft to provide the integration software, or middleware, for building out APIs to connect systems, applications, data, devices and other platforms.

Many clients choose MuleSoft because they are cloud-based, more centralized, with a more all-inclusive capability. Clients find that they can get started very quickly and very easily with MuleSoft. They’ll run it as software as a service (SaaS), or even integration platform as a service (PaaS), so clients simply pay a monthly fee and MuleSoft will run the entire infrastructure.

Prolifics first brought in architects to discuss our expertise in integration and talk to MDSC about our MuleSoft capabilities. We then built a series of APIs to integrate two of their core systems, SAP and JD Edwards, with other systems, along with other MuleSoft implementations.

We brought in a testing team that built a number of automated test cases to test the new APIs out. We left the automated testing in place for those APIs, so MDSC not only had the newly integrated infrastructure, but automated test scripts that they could rerun when they made changes or added new APIs.

Result 

We started MDSC on their API-integration journey to make MuleSoft the standard within their company. The automated testing saves MDSC considerable time and money over their previous manual testing provider.

Data is more readily available, and MDSC’s business is more flexible, dynamic and faster. For example, field reps taking orders no longer have to send the orders in via email or transmit them for batch processing. Now, the reps’ order-taking application automatically calls an API that places the order into the sales system immediately, wirelessly from the laptop out in the field. The rep can then tell his client exactly what is available in inventory and when it will be shipped, as opposed to, “I’ve put in your order. And I’ll let you know what’s going to happen.” By getting real time data through integrating in a more modern way, information flows faster, which can speed up the business and increase revenue.

If you’d like to know more about our MuleSoft expertise and integrating your systems, email us at solutions@prolifics.com.

To find out more about MDFC’s success, download the full case study.