Customer Scenario

Core back-office systems, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, are both crucial to operations and historically challenging to integrate. But to get a full understanding of a business’s performance and make informed projections, integrations between an ERP and other business applications are pivotal. To begin automating their sales processes, our client, a large manufacturer of agricultural products, chose Microsoft Dynamics as their CRM. Increasing visibility into sales, however, meant integrating the CRM with their existing on-premise implementation of the JD Edwards (JDE) ERP. Not only did they want the systems to share sales order data, but they also needed automated synchronization between the two systems.

Solution Approach

While the company’s JDE ERP was an on-prem installation, the decision was made to take advantage of the cloud’s benefits by employing Dell Boomi, a packaged iPaaS solution. Boomi offered a JDBC technology connector for connection with the JDE DB2 database, which helped accelerate integration implementation. The designed solution also leveraged Azure components, like Azure Service Bus and virtual machines hosting Boomi Atoms, to add resiliency. Integration patterns using a watermark timestamp solution allowed for synchronization to occur incrementally based on the last modification of the record in JDE. As a whole, the solution allowed for a seamless, automated synchronization process that managed updates for over 20,000 customers, one million sales down to the line items, and all associated metadata.

Results

Once implemented, sales orders initiated in the JDE ERP were reflected in near real-time to the Microsoft Dynamics ERP. This increased visibility into both sales performance and distribution and enabled better, data-driven decision making for the business. Additionally, the new solution creates the opportunity and increases options for the customer to migrate away from their legacy JD Edwards platform.