IBM(R) WebSphere(R) Business Integration for Retail Distribution is a portfolio of adapters that provides retailers and their suppliers with industry-specific business process templates, a portfolio of connectors to leading applications, and an integration hub to help them automate their current business processes.
This overview focuses on the portfolio's Item Synchronization for Suppliers solution, which automatically integrates a supplier's item business processes with those of its trading partners. The solution uses the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaboration for UCCnet(R) Item Synchronization, IBM WebSphere Adapters, and the IBM WebSphere InterChange Server (ICS), to provide affordable, extensible, scalable, and secure access to the UCCnet standard registry. (A subsidiary of the Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC(TM)), UCCnet is a neutral, tax-exempt organization that provides item registry and data synchronization for electronic commerce based on industry developed standards.) The resulting improved efficiencies in supply chains can significantly drive down costs and improve profits for suppliers.
Today's suppliers face many challenges. An enterprise's business processes and associated operations can be stretched to the breaking point as a result of:
To meet the escalating data demands on suppliers, UCCnet has implemented multi-industry standards for product identification and related electronic communications. It implements these standards by requiring its community of trading partners to provide standardized item data in particular formats to its registry. The system also includes integral compliance checks to assure the integrity of the data in all cases. By subscribing to the UCCnet registry, suppliers can potentially change prices in near real-time and greatly improve their speed-to-retail-shelf for new products and item maintenance.
For suppliers to work effectively with UCCnet, they must be able to synchronize their enterprise item data with UCCnet systems quickly and easily, without the need to rewrite or replace existing systems. They must be able to extract business information from diverse sources and move this information through disparate applications quickly and accurately to keep item information current. Plus, they must be able to get up and running on the UCCnet registry quickly with minimal disruption to their current business processes and enterprise systems.
The Item Synchronization for Suppliers solution meets these challenges by helping suppliers automate the item synchronization process in compliance with UCCnet standards. The heart of this modular, open-systems-based solution is the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaboration for UCCnet Item Synchronization. This collaboration, composed of six pre-built templates, enables suppliers to automatically add items to, update or delist items within, or withdraw items from UCCnet when item updates are made in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. When an item is updated in a supplier's ERP system, item data is automatically validated, reformatted, and sent to the UCCnet standard registry. This collaboration also provides a single process for communicating item information to trading partners via UCCnet. Thus, a supplier's enterprise data is synchronized with item data sent outside the enterprise.
The solution's benefits to suppliers include:
For more detailed information about solution components, architecture, and installation, see the following: