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Case Studies

Honda/ETL Solutions (July 2008)    
Honda UK (HUK) Manufacturing, part of the Honda group, was founded in 1985 and has since established itself as a leading automotive manufacturer in Europe. HUK has a huge network that needs to be effectively integrated, with a unit production equal to 885 cars per day, 75% of which are exported, and 4,700 associates. Innovation is core to the thinking of the leaders at Honda, constantly seeking new solutions and incorporating leading technologies. Integration for the Honda dealer network is a demanding and challenging task. Its network of dealers is vast, using a great variety of dealer management systems (DMSs), its production numbers are very large, and the quality of services exceptionally high. HUK has chosen ETL’s Transformation Manager (TM) to provide integration for its dealer network.
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Churchill Insurance/Modcomp (April 2008)    
Now part of Royal Bank of Scotland Insurance, Churchill Insurance is one of the UK’s top five insurers. The company was formed in June 1989 with 88 employees selling car insurance policies, and added home insurance products the following year. Today, Churchill insures more than 7 million cars and homes, and has a customer base of almost 3 million. The company employs over 7,000 people. To provide the best possible service and gain maximum business advantage, Churchill decided that its decision support information, provided by Experian, would need to be integrated in real time with its existing underwriting and claims applications. Experian is the world’s leading provider of decision-making information that helps reduce fraud and mitigate risk. A middleware solution was sought that would enable the inhouse Oracle-based applications to seamlessly integrate with the Experian IBM CICS environment. Churchill Insurance engaged Modcomp to provide the solution. Modcomp’s proposed solution was considered to be both cost-effective and efficient.
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Investors in People/Pervasive Software – exclusive interview (September 2007)    
Investors in People UK (IIPUK) is a non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. IIPUK’s aim is to support people management and development in UK organisations through its Standard and Profile tools. IIPUK was formed in 1993 to take national ownership of the Investors in People ‘Standard’, protect its integrity and ensure its successful promotion and development. The Standard provides a framework that helps organisations improve performance and realise objectives through the effective management and development of their staff. IIPUK needed a centralised system where it could maintain up-to-date information itself and that could be accessed as and when needed and rapidly reported on. IIP decided on a hosted CRM solution from Salesforce.com and selected Deloitte & Touche to tailor and implement it to meet its requirements. The next challenge it faced was bringing data from its partners’ 13 different systems into the CRM solution, so it looked at a number of vendors who could provide an integration solution and chose Business Integrator from Pervasive Software.
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Griffiths Waite/Casewise (August 2007)    
Griffiths Waite was established in 1994 and specialises in the delivery of BPM solutions through service oriented architecture utilising Lean Six Sigma process improvement techniques. Griffiths Waite has become one of the foremost authorities in Oracle application development and e-business suite implementation, respected widely through the Oracle user group community and Oracle itself. Its priority is always to develop a close and enduring partnership with clients by consistently delivering high quality systems and services. It uses Casewise Corporate Modeler at the heart of its business improvement methodology – a Lean Six Sigma toolkit that forms the blueprint for the development of business solutions based on service oriented architecture (SOA).
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Ideal Standard/Sterling Commerce (May 2007)    
A division of American Standard Companies, Ideal Standard is the world’s leading provider of bathroom systems and kitchen fixtures. With customers in over 40 countries, American Standard employs 60,000 people across three business operations. To maintain a leading position in global manufacturing and in an effort to gain market share outside of the US, the company embarked on an aggressive expansion strategy. The success of Ideal Standard’s expansion was dependent upon the company’s ability to address the underlying IT challenge of serving and conducting business with its trading partner community. Ideal Standard required a unified system that would integrate new partners easily, sustain ongoing and future growth and offer a single interface for dealing with customer demands. It chose Sterling Commerce's Gentran Integration Suite on the basis of its functionality, scalability and flexibility.
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Heinz/Sterling Commerce (May 2007)    
H.J. Heinz is a premier international company supplying branded foods to retail and food service channels, and has number one or number two branded businesses in more than 50 world markets. Although it is a US-based company, approximately 60% of Heinz’s total sales come from outside the US market. In Europe, Heinz has grown organically and through acquisition over the years. This has resulted in a very fragmented IT infrastructure that supports multiple back-end applications, ERP systems and a variety of messaging standards and protocols. In order to maintain and improve on the level of service provided to customers, Heinz realised that it was no longer able to, nor was it cost-effective, to run and maintain all of these systems and applications. Therefore, Heinz embarked on an ERP consolidation (standardising on SAP) and messaging standard/protocol centralisation initiative. In order to successfully move all customers from the fragmented communications infrastructure to the centralised EDI and SAP solution, Heinz relied on the project management, implementation and mapping services of Sterling Commerce Professional Services organisation.
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Cancer Registries/InterSystems (December 2006)    
Few people realise that statistics and information on cancer incidence in England originate from the regional cancer registries. These organisations have the onerous task of tracking individuals right from the first diagnosis of the disease. In 2005, three of the country’s nine regional cancer registries, Thames Cancer Registry, Merseyside and Cheshire Cancer Registry and North West Cancer Registry (the Registries), initiated a pilot programme to integrate, validate and manage information from hundreds of data sources. The programme, named Entente, aims to transform raw data on cancer trends, prevention and care into information that can be used more effectively by primary care trusts, general practitioners, hospices and charities, the Office for National Statistics, the Department of Health and others. Previously, the Registries relied on inefficient manual data collection and re-entry processes. The decision to initiate their Entente programme and implement Ensemble from InterSystems was driven by the need to update these procedures.
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Kimberly-Clark Europe/InterSystems (December 2006)    
Employing more than 62,000 people worldwide, Kimberly-Clark posted sales of $15.1 billion in 2004, and produces some of the world’s most trusted and recognised brands – including Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, PullUps, Kotex and Depend. It holds the number one or number two position globally in most of the major consumer products categories in which it competes. Every day, 1.3 billion people – nearly a quarter of the world’s population – use Kimberly-Clark’s brands. Key to Kimberly-Clark’s success is its ability to deliver the right products, in the right quantities, to the right places, at the right time. Therefore, Kimberly-Clark Europe made the strategic decision to directly manage its European transportation through a shared service centre (SSC) based in Brighton, as part of its continuing efforts to maintain high levels of customer service and operational efficiency. InterSystems Ensemble, a universal integration platform engineered to facilitate rapid integration and composite application development, based on a single development and management environment, was chosen to meet the short delivery schedule.
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Harrods/Sun – exclusive interview (November 2006)    
Harrods in Knightsbridge is arguably the most glamorous store in the world. It is also a global brand associated with luxury and quality. With a turnover of around £610 million, it opens its doors annually to over 5 million visitors, serving them from 1 million square feet of sales space. Harrods Estates, Harrods Bank and Harrods Aviation are among the other companies that belong to Harrods Holdings, as well as an online and mail order business. In the 21st century, the retail environment is changing rapidly and with more than 250 departments, Harrods’ diversity is a challenge. Managing this diversity and delivering to customers the personal service they have come to expect requires flexibility at all levels of the business, including IT. In response to this, Harrods is currently implementing an advanced SOA-based IT infrastructure, using Sun’s Java CAPS (Composite Application Platform).
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Schroder Investments/Pervasive Software (March 2006)    
Schroder Investments Ltd (SIL) is the retail mutual funds subsidiary of Schroders, a world leader in asset management. With 39 offices worldwide, Schroders manages investments for institutions, corporations, private clients, individual investors, charities, pension funds and unit trust holders. SIL is one of the largest retail asset management companies in the UK with £12 billion under management. Nearly two years ago, SIL selected the Global Funds Administration System (GFAS) to replace a number of longstanding applications. The migration to GFAS presented SIL with the sizeable challenge of bringing its business-critical data from a variety of legacy systems into a single system. To ensure the success of the migration, SIL selected Pervasive Software for the central integration tool.
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CPA/Pervasive – exclusive interview (November 2005)    
CPA (Computer Patent Annuities Limited Partnership) was founded in 1969 and is now the world’s leading intellectual property management specialist. It has around 60,000 clients worldwide and performs over 1 million patent and trademark renewals a year. CPA’s portfolio of products and services includes software systems, patent, design and trademark renewals, trademark searching and watching, domain name management, internet watching and patent analytics reports and consulting. CPA's bigger corporate clients wanted to use electronic data transfer (EDT). In 1996 work was done to develop an inhouse ETL tool that would extract, transform and load different data onto the server – this was called the Black Box. This did the job but could only cope with text formats, and any Excel data had to be manually converted. In 2000, CPA replaced the Black Box with an off-the-shelf system – a buy versus build policy. Pervasive’s Data Junction (now Data Integrator) was recommended as the ETL tool to convert client data.
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Heinz/Sterling Commerce (February 2005)    
In Europe, Heinz has grown organically and through acquisition over the years. This has resulted in a very fragmented IT infrastructure that supports multiple back-end applications, ERP systems and a variety of messaging standards and protocols. In order to maintain and improve on the level of service provided to customers, Heinz realised that it was no longer able to, nor was it cost effective, to run and maintain all of these systems and applications. Therefore, in order to streamline operations, eliminate cost centres and promote efficiencies to all trading partners participating in its supply chain, Heinz embarked on an ERP consolidation (standardising on SAP) and messaging standard/protocol centralisation initiative. By utilising the complete solution offering from Sterling Commerce and its ECD service, Heinz was able to successfully focus on its SAP implementation, while having peace of mind that Sterling Commerce would be capable of project managing, implementing and delivering a robust and scalable communications infrastructure to all customers.
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Sainsbury's/SeeBeyond & Accenture (February 2005)    
In the retail industry, intense competition is a fact of life. Faced with annual increases of 20 per cent in its IT costs, Sainsbury’s decided to replace its legacy business applications with best-of-breed equivalents running on a new high-performance infrastructure. To put its cost reduction strategy into practice, Sainsbury’s awarded a seven-year transformation and outsourcing contract to Accenture. SeeBeyond was chosen to provide the EAI solution for the new Sainsbury’s Integration Architecture. SeeBeyond effectively partnered with Accenture to deploy the EAI solution across the enterprise.
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W H Smith/SeeBeyond (February 2005)    
W H Smith is one of the UK’s leading retail groups, with nearly 1,500 stores in 12 countries worldwide and sales of some £2.9 billion. But its high-street retail outlets face increasing competition from a number of sources, including internet-based retailers, supermarkets, and specialist bookshops and music stores. Many of the legacy applications running on its existing mainframe architecture – such as payroll systems, electronic data interchange and stock planning systems – were inflexible and did not support change. A new retail management system, including demand forecasting and merchandising applications, was also required. The challenge was how to incorporate these new applications within the W H Smith infrastructure and it opted for SeeBeyond’s Business Integration Suite.
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