Customer Background

Country of deployment: USA

Industry: Retail

Client operations: A global retail chain of men and women clothing

Situation

The company belongs to the Apparel industry and operates out of the West Coast region. With more than $500 million in annual revenues, the company operates multiple retail outlets across more than 10 U.S states. The result is a significant pressure on the company’s small in-house IT operations.

A major challenge surfaced as soon the company deployed a new order management system (OMS) across the four major regions in which it operated i.e. U.S.A, Europe, Far East Asia, and Middle-east.

Previously, the client was using different 3rd party apps for financial management, order management and PoS (point-of-sales) data entry. The 3rd party tools exposed their APIs and the client’s software development team had to write custom code using BizTalk. This meant that a long development cycle (usually several weeks and months) was required to expose the legacy IT systems to these 3rd party APIs.

Solution

Allied Consultants delivered a cloud-based integration solution to help the client significantly reduce their development and implementation timeline for deploying a cloud-based solution. The solution was proposed to help route the data from the client’s global retail franchises to the back-end OMS (order management system).

The solution utilized Azure App Service as a fully managed PaaS (Platform as a Service) to make it easier to build the integration apps. Azure Logic Apps was used to automate business process execution and workflow using an easy-to-use visual designer.  

Fig: Solution architecture

Logic Apps integration solution
Source: Allied Consultants

The BizTalk API apps were used to conveniently include validation, transformation, rules, and more into the Logic App workflow developed for the client. The RAD (Rapid application development) framework of Azure services helped the client obtain a clear ROI of this cloud-based integration workload within a short span of 12 weeks.

Future implementation: The solution was tested and staged within the US region. After the full production-grade rollout, the solution will be extended to other regions.

Benefits

The overall time and cost of deploying the integration solution were decreased from 4-6 months to 12 weeks. By using the RAD capabilities of Azure platform, the client was able to achieve:

  • Faster time-to-market for the new integration solutions
  • Reduced costs and capital expenditures (CapEx)
  • Browser-based management of integration workloads
  • Reduction in total development time
  • Quick integration of best of breed solutions/connectors
  • Low cost to move the solution into the production stage

Technologies

  • Azure API Apps
  • Azure Logic Apps
  • OOTB from Azure Marketplace
  • Custom connectors
  • BizTalk API Apps