Cenveo retains a multi-million account
with
a Fortune 20 health care services provider using Allora
Reviewer
Bob Weinstein, Director Information Resources La Salle Data Center for
Cenveo, a leading provider of commercial printing products averaging $1.6
billion in sales.
Background
Cenveo, Inc. (NYSE: CVO), www.cenveo.com, is one of North America's leading
providers of visual communications with one-stop services from design
through fulfillment. The company is uniquely positioned to serve direct
customers through its commercial segment, and distributors and resellers
of printed office products through its Quality Park resale segment. The
company's broad portfolio of services and products includes e-services,
envelopes, offset and digital printing, labels and business documents.
Cenveo currently has approximately 10,000 employees and more than 80 production
locations plus five advanced fulfillment and distribution centers throughout
North America. The Data Center in Chicago manages networks and software
for the envelope portion of the commercial segment. My team serves about
1000 end-users, in 20 locations around the country.
Platforms
At the LaSalle location, we have AS/400, iSeries, and Windows 2000-based
servers, and also a few applications running on Linux. Cenveo as a whole
has over 80 locations and many more IT platforms.
Problem and HiT Software Solution
We were required, as a condition of retaining a $3.2 million contract
with a 'Fortune 20' health care services provider, to be able to interface
our web catalog with their SAP-based procurement system, receive POs,
and transmit acknowledgements and invoices automatically using the xCBL
(Common Business Language) XML standards. Our research showed that the
best design for the process would be through some kind of Java-based programming
and we lacked the in-house expertise. We worked briefly with consultants
who left us feeling that even if they could do the job - and that was
not a sure thing - the costs would be higher than we were prepared to
pay. We loaded WebSphere on the iSeries and made a few dry-run proof-of-concept
efforts to get the process to work using the WebSphere tools.
One of the consultants attempted the same thing. Both they and we failed. WebSphere was a disappointment in this project. We were looking for a simpler, more agile solution. The whole project, in fact, didn't seem particularly complex to us - except for the part that would translate between XML and DB2/400. We also tried a parsing tool that was published on IBM's alphaWorks website. It worked as a prototype but was complex and awkward to deploy. We didn't think it would work for us.
We tested jAllora after reading the extensive and detailed product documentation on the HiT website. The results were very positive and we felt if we got the tool, we could put together all the rest of the parts (the catalog and the interface to our internal systems) by ourselves without any outside help or additional expense. The Allora wizard worked beautifully with Borland's JBuilder to create the Java objects we needed, based on the projects we had set up and tested in the Allora application.
Product Functionality
The application we built with Allora is simple and powerful. First, one
of our processes is decrypting, renaming our customer XML transactions,
and dropping them into a network folder. Then, we built a small Java program
that looks every hour for new transactions and triggers the Allora process
to automatically import (unmarshal) the customer XML PO into our iSeries
database. Once a day, we FTP an XML invoice back to the customer from
the iSeries using the Allora export (marshal) function. We built our Java
classes using the Allora plug-in for JBuilder. It runs on a Windows 2000
server that requires no maintenance. Whether we are supporting SAP xCBL
standard or ARIBA cXML, building a new interface takes very little time.
I am recommending Allora at other Cenveo locations as no other product
provides as much value to support XML schema-centric messaging. I know
we are only using 10% of the power of Allora using elementary marshal
and unmarshal function; nevertheless, we have accomplished all our objectives.
In the future, we may also use more evolved transportation protocols like
JMS or Web Services, which are already supported by Allora.
Strengths
- Ease-of-use: Though we had never worked with Java before, using Allora was straightforward. We easily created a mapping file visually and a Java class using the Allora Wizard. Only elementary programming was involved.
- Empowerment: It gave us a lot of emotional satisfaction to see that our small IT team could build this process, whereas many consultants had failed. We now own our solution and do not need to rely on external help anymore.
- Technical support: The HiT Software team were very supportive and helped us each step of the way despite the fact we had no Java experience.
Selection Criteria
The most potent benefit for our department was achieving the goal by our own labor, and
the vindication of our belief that we could do it without pouring out buckets of consulting
money. The hard benefits that convinced us to use Allora were:
- Business retention: We retained the account. And the system went live on October 18th, 2004.
- Development time and cost savings: Allora enabled us to use our own resources for the project, and we believe the savings from doing the work internally are no less than $50,000. We are going live December 3 with another Allora-enabled project for a national financial services company. The protocol this time is cXML but the project process was easily repeatable.
- Competitiveness: In bidding on future RFP's, we can now say we can do the job, not 'we're working on it' or 'we might be able to do it.'
Vendor Support
I have been very impressed with the excellent level of technical support in the HiT Software team
both by phone and email during the course of our evaluation of the tool and with technical problems
that came up during the project development. They are very responsive and knowledgeable.
HiT Software, Inc. can be reached at: www.hitsw.com