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ArjoWiggins

ArjoWiggins are the world’s leading manufacturer of technical and creative papers with a turnover of over 1.5 billion euro.

The problem

ArjoWiggins had planned a fundamental change to their IT strategy with two major repercussions: 1) their IT systems and infrastructure would be centralised and 2) they would migrate from a variety of bespoke and heavily modified package solutions to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

Because of the move to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne all the interfaces to their legacy systems would have to be re-written. Not unusual in itself. But, in the case of ArjoWiggins this meant the creation of close to 100 (one hundred) new interfaces from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. How could all these interfaces be designed, developed, tested and later viewed or monitored in a controlled way?

The work

Work on proprietary interfaces can be difficult and time consuming with many IT professionals taking the ‘trial and error’ approach to development. DWS was faced with the task of designing and developing over 100 interfaces (to/from) so a very different approach was required.

DWS and ArjoWiggins decided to take a holistic look at the problem rather than trying to solve the problem on an interface-by-interface basis. Their innovative approach to design on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne led to the creation of a methodology for handling the inbound and outbound interfaces. This methodology enabled a standard approach to the design and development of each of the interfaces making the task of maintaining and supporting them at a later date far more manageable.

The large number of interfaces would inevitably create a support challenge for the IT department, and as such DWS and ArjoWiggins thought it was prudent to include a common approach to monitoring in every interface that was written.

The Interface Monitoring Tool enables analysis of the performance, history and trends associated with each interface as well as the ability to generate audit reports to a low level of detail.

The result

The Interface Monitoring Tool has proved invaluable to ArjoWiggins in isolating, identifying and fixing any interface related issues. Arjo are now considering which audit/trend reports will be most useful so that problems can be identified before they start impacting the performance of the interface. The support and maintenance is more straightforward for the 100 interfaces and ArjoWiggins have the level of control they need.

Technical configuration

Environment
Software JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Xe Update 7
Database DB2
Hardware AS400
Runtime HTML

Modules impacted
Financials (AR, AP, GL)
Payments Processing
Sales Order Processing
Purchase Order Processing
Inventory
Transportation
Pricing
EDI Processing
Warehousing
Manufacturing