Softshare Case Studies

Advanced Decorative Systems

Business Issue

Advanced Decorative Systems (ADS) was rapidly outgrowing its rip-n-read EDI solution. The company, a provider of decorative automotive interior systems, received an average of 60 delivery forecast and just-in-time delivery schedules a week from its three EDI trading partners: Delphi Vega, Johnson Controls, and Continental. These lengthy EDI documents came out to hundreds of printed pages weekly—each of which was passed onto warehouse employees for manual entry into several different applications.

When a fourth customer approached ADS for EDI compliance, the automotive company knew it was time to invest in a better EDI solution. The company's objective was straightforward: to implement a solution that would allow its warehouses to easily see and process the items and quantities that they were responsible for shipping that day.

Softshare Solution

ADS contacted Softshare after downloading Softshare's free EDI editing utility, EDI Notepad. Impressed with EDI Notepad's intuitive EDI handling, and equally impressed by the mapping flexibilities of Softshare's enterprise-level products, ADS purchased Softshare Delta and Softshare ECS as the backbone of its new EDI solution, and hired Softshare to design and implement the solution.

Softshare's Professional Services Group designed an intermediate database and, using Delta, wrote several translation maps to integrate inbound EDI planning data into this new database. Another map was developed to retrieve the current day's EDI planning data from the database and write it to a user-friendly Web page. Within ECS, the EDI to database maps were configured to run upon EDI arrival and the database to HTML map was configured to run every 15 minutes, ensuring easy and timely access to the items scheduled to ship that day.

With ADS's main objective accomplished, Softshare's Professional Services Group turned its attention to reducing the amount of data entry being performed in the warehouse. The Softshare team built a Web Services solution on top of the previously-designed Web page so that, upon login, a Web Service request would prompt ECS to return a Web form in which employees could enter the ID, item quantity, and number of cartons that resulted for each picked shipment. These shipment details were mapped back to the intermediary database and, from there, several more maps were written to automate the generation of EDI advance ship notices and bar code labels.

In addition to using Delta and ECS to integrate data across the company, ADS also subscribed to Softshare's value-added network for convenient communications with EDI trading partners. ECS was configured to connect to a mailbox on Softshare's network, through which incoming and outgoing EDI data is routed.

The Benefits

With Softshare's solution in place, ADS's warehouse operations are no longer hindered by the static and cumbersome nature of paper-based data, allowing the company to be responsive to its trading partners' needs. In addition, warehouse employees were relieved of the tedious and error-prone task of rekeying data several times offer, significantly improving productivity.

The Future

With EDI processes automated, Advanced Decorative Systems is considering incorporating EDI invoice responses into its operations, as well as adding new EDI trading partners, without having to worry about increased burden on employees. And because Delta is an any-to-any translator, the company is looking at other areas of operations unrelated to EDI that would benefit from integrated processes.

PaperPak

PaperPak knows all about paper. As a leading provider of adult incontinence products for more than 40 years, PaperPak uses paper fibers to manufacture its high-quality Attends®, Confidence®, and Tuckables® brands. But PaperPak, a technologically savvy company, also knows when not to use paper.

The company first embraced paperless e-commerce in the fall of 1993. In 2001, support for the Harbinger client/server translation solution that PaperPak was using was discontinued, leaving PaperPak in the market for a replacement e-commerce solution.

Because PaperPak was averaging in excess of $10,000 per month in Advantis VAN fees, PaperPak's primary objective was to find an e-commerce solution that supported Internet communications protocols so that the company could exchange EDI documents directly with their trading partners using FTP or SMTP. The EDI List Serve pointed PaperPak in Softshare's direction.

In April of 2002, PaperPak began implementation of Softshare ECS and Softshare Delta. Nine months later, PaperPak successfully converted the last of its 50 e-commerce trading partners over to the new Softshare solution and, in the process, dramatically reduced its monthly VAN fees to less than $1,000 per month. Much of this savings is due to ECS' support of direct FTP communications which allows PaperPak to bypass VAN services altogether, but considerable savings also resulted from switching to Softshare's low-cost VAN services for those relationships that still required third-party networks.

Art Douglas, eCommerce Systems Manager for PaperPak, is enormously pleased, "The Softshare solution has more than paid for itself and vastly exceeded our initial ROI projections, making my employer very happy, and making me look really good."

Softshare Delta also plays a crucial role in PaperPak's new e-commerce solution. In addition to translating the 20,000 EDI documents that PaperPak exchanges with its trading partners each month, Delta synchronizes Paperpak's ERP system with its Web ordering system and formats incoming Web orders for importation into the order management system. And Delta's ability to query internal databases during EDI translation allows many types of data errors to be corrected or flagged on-the-fly, taking PaperPak's business process management efforts to a whole new level.

Frigidaire Financial Corporation

Frigidaire Financial Corporation (FFC), a wholly owned subsidiary of AB Electrolux, provides high-quality financial services to customers of AB Electrolux, its WCI divisions, and other companies. These services include retail financing, wholesale inventory financing, and commercial leasing.

With millions of dollars in business being represented by more than 10,000 EDI transactions a month, FFC needed to find a way to streamline its e-commerce operations. In the spring of 2001, FFC, with the help of Softshare reseller IEC Technologies, developed a Microsoft SQL Server database fronted by a Web-based interface. Storing all EDI transactions, this database served as a repository and staging point for integrating data into the back-end application.

But how was FFC going to populate its new Microsoft SQL Server database? Enter Softshare Delta. Using Delta's sophisticated database mapping features, all incoming EDI transactions were translated directly into the database. This ingenious approach dramatically reduced development costs by achieving a single point of integration for all EDI transactions.

Not afraid to push Delta's cutting-edge technologies, FFC recently agreed to implement the final stage of inbound processing by eliminating the typical flat file intermediary approach. A database-to-database translation solution was created to integrate the transactions stored in the SQL Server repository directly with the DB2 database located on their AS/400. To round out FFC's innovative e-commerce integration solution, Softshare's Electronic Commerce Server (ECS) provides a complement to Delta by managing the flow of incoming and outgoing e-commerce data.

With Softshare Delta, Frigidaire Financial Corporation has been able to use their resources more efficiently, offering value-added services to their trading partners and leaving their competition out in the cold!