Client background

• Company: Leading Canadian technical apparel brand
• Key services: Designs and develops technical apparel, accessories and lifestyle products for men and women
• Areas of operation: The US, Canada, The UK, Australia, New Zealand and Japan

Challenge

The Canadian technical apparel brand was dealing with shipment and order fulfilment delays as the related processes were manual in nature. The shipment confirmation was done over the post and they could receive postal acknowledgments for only 30% of the shipments, which triggered further inefficiencies in data management. Customer details were manually recorded, making data breaches highly probable.

All this resulted in higher costs, poor customer satisfaction and reduced business growth rate, which dragged down their revenue growth by 30-40%.

So, the technical apparel brand wanted data security at every stage of the order fulfilment process and a hack-proof system to keep customer information confidential and in safe zone.

They needed to integrate their Cloud-based ERP and e-commerce solutions with distribution partners鈥� logistic solutions and automate both shipments and shipment confirmation processes. The aim was to streamline order fulfillment processes across their sales, finance and fulfillment functions.

Solution

91快活林 designed and developed a resilient integration architecture between the apparel brand鈥檚 ERP system and their distribution partners using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform capabilities.

• Created an Application Programming Interface (API) service contract (canonical model) that was compatible with all systems (ERP, SAP and AS2) in the scope of integration
• APIs were hosted on MuleSoft CloudHub and exposed for easy consumption by the ERP system and distribution partners
• Provided a sleek dashboard to monitor and track all real-time transactions; Enabled access to real-time data for analytics through MuleSoft鈥檚 Anypoint Analytics
• Ensured maximum data privacy through 128-bit Java Cryptography Encryption (JCE) in transaction layers
• X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) connector and DataWeave components of MuleSoft were used for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to EDI and EDI to JSON transformation. This helped the distribution partners with error-free shipping order placement and confirmation from the ERP system
• Designed an automated support framework to provide technical and functional assistance to minimize transaction failures
• Configured OAuth 2.0 authentication to address the data security issue and provide security to the API resources

Business impact

• Completely eliminated the risk of manual errors, which was earlier at 20-25%, through end-to-end process automation
• Zero downtime of services with MuleSoft Anypoint CloudHub iPaaS solution
• 60% reduction in order-to-shipment time, resulting in improved profitability and customer satisfaction
• Enabled processing of about 50,000 transactions per day, up from the previous average volume of 2000 transactions per day
• With the new solution, each transaction was logged, which enabled the client to achieve a good PCI audit score
• Automated the entire order and shipment confirmation process

鈥淭he Canadian technical apparel brand leveraged 91快活林鈥檚 Cloud-based integration solution to transform their sales processes across business units. Faster order shipments and secure transactions helped them retain customers and rev up sales.鈥�

Avanish Raut - Head of Cloud Integration Services, 91快活林 Limited