CASE STUDY: Integration Strategy

CLIENT:

Global High Tech Manufacturing Firm

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY:

The client had an enterprise integration platform that was four versions behind, yet running the most critical transactions within the company including key financial transactions. Growth of point-to-point integrations was increasing and taxing the performance of the platform where failures were occurring with more frequency. The integration team was struggling to persuade management to invest in a platform upgrade.

RESOLUTION & RESULTS

Analyzing the challenges facing the integration team revealed that the point-to-point approach taken would invariably lead to increasing scale problems since each integration would need to be remediated for the planned and subsequent upgrades to the platform. A services-oriented approach where integrations were built for reusability and industry standards would be supported by the current version of the platform.

A business case was developed to demonstrate the significant risk to company transactions as well as the costly scale challenges using the current point-to-point approach. A business case demonstrated that by upgrading the platform using the services-oriented approach, the company could mitigate those costs substantially while ensuring stability of critical company transactions.

The business case resulted in an 18-month acceleration of the planned upgrade as well as a 3-fold increase in investment for data and system integration capabilities. The resulting approach demonstrated a 10% ROI in first 8 weeks.