Bossini Advances Its Supply Chain Strategy With the WebMethods ESB

To keep ahead in a fast-moving industry, leading Asia-Pacific fashion retailer Bossini needed to have better visibility into its business and operational processes through the synchronization of real-time data across multiple orders, shipments and stock-keeping units.

By leveraging the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Bossini is able to speed up the deployment of new applications and processes and bring new partners on board much more quickly.

The intuitive development environment of the webMethods ESB has enabled Bossini's programmers to easily, and quickly, build the large number of interfaces required to meet its complex integration requirements.

Upon transforming to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Bossini could synchronize real-time data from multiple orders, shipments and stock-keeping units (SKUs) across its Point-of-Sale (POS) systems and Warehouse Management System (WMS) inventory.

Benefits include:

• Better visibility into real-time processes with dynamic synchronization of data between point of sale and warehouse management systems

• Additional business capabilities, e.g. late shipment and sales performance monitoring via dashboards/SMS and stock-on-hand monitoring for all markets.

• Factory order allocation reduced from three days to one

• Finance month-end closing slashed from 25 days to seven

• Developer and IT productivity increased by up to 30 percent through user-friendly intuitive interface and re-use of programming objects from the webMethods ESB.

A standards-based solution

With the webMethods Enterprise Service Bus, Bossini is able to take full advantage of the standards-based interfaces to integrate with their existing systems and utilize service orchestration to connect their existing systems to their processes. This allows Bossini to speed up the deployment of new applications and processes and bring new partners on board much more quickly.

Subsequent changes are also easier to implement, and the company enjoys cost savings resulting from the re-use of the service components. "The webMethods ESB enables us to achieve real-time interoperability across numerous disparate applications, including independence from the constraints of their operating systems and hardware platforms," said Mr. Andrew Ling, Director of IT and Supply Chain of the Bossini Group.

Of equal importance is the platform's flexibility and ease of use. "This was crucial in our ability to gain competitive advantage in the fickle world of apparel retailing," said Ling. "In our decision, we also took into account the faster adoption, lower training costs and quicker return-on-investment enabled by the very intuitive design of the webMethods ESB."