Manufacturer Case Study
Onepoint helps a Fortune 500 company leading furniture manufacturer in the US migrate its Service-Oriented Architecture to a Talend Enterprise Service Bus
A Fortune 500 company, the client is one of the largest manufacturers of home building products like architectural paint, exterior wood care products, kitchen, bath cabinetry vinyl, fiberglass windows, plumbing and installation services to the United States and Canadian do-it-yourself channel.
Established in 1929, it currently has over 32,500 employees and approximately 90 manufacturing facilities (comprising more than 20 companies) 60 of which are in the US and 20 in other parts of the world) As of 2014, the client has declared $8,521 Billion in annual net sales
The Business Drivers
- Cost reduction as the current licensed technology would not be a viable and scalable solution.
- To strategically reduce dependency on a proprietary technology vendor. This would offer more flexibility with emerging robust technologies.
- Prepare an operating platform based on best of breed of products.
- Embrace a distributed architecture enabling better decision making.
To validate and achieve the above vision the client needed a team to build and test web services as a Proof of Concept with a view to migrate their existing services from the Oracle ESB platform to the new Talend based ESB platform
The Requirement
The client wanted to implement a number of business improvements to their existing single vendor technology as a firm fixed price (FFP) project based on Talend ESB capabilities. The project brought with it two important initial criteria:
- A stringent time window as the software contract and service renewals were a deadline driver.
- Strict costs controls as this served as a Proof of Concept.
The Solution
We engineers proposed and successfully created the following solution which ensures a seamless transfer to Talend ESB without disrupting the existing systems:
- Enrich and validate data after each service call by creating a scheduled “client” job of multiple web services, with an existing REST interface and others with two new SOAP interface.
- Based on the currently available Oracle Procedure and absence of the WSDL- (web service description language) definitions devising a software routine that generated ERP Order and Shipping Addresses.
- Creating an Oracle PLSQL procedure wrapping the Original procedure which could then be used by Talend to “call” the Oracle procedure.
Working with the mapping specification provided by the client, which contained not only the expected classical data mapping matrix, but also business rules for conditional XML manipulation. This required certain software designing like adding an extra XML node to the invocation of certain routines with some pre-defined values.
This Talend job acts as a “client” of multiple web services, interfacing with some of these services with REST and others with a SOAP interface enriching and transforming the data after each service call.
Additional challenges that had to be overcome to realise this solution:
- Unavailability of a well-defined specification of description language for the web services that were being worked with.
- Document limitations of the Oracle database driver for Java (technical: JDBC driver).
- A mapping specification was not immediately available to work with.
