InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 26, 1999
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Opportunity For Efficiency
Electronic commerce presents companies with an opportunity to create more efficient and cost-effective business processes. In turn, companies use those processes to improve their interactions with customers.
That was the driver behind Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's app- integration effort. The bank needed to integrate data that resided in multiple systems to boost its responsiveness to customer needs. A customer's checking account, for example, must be linked to stock records, an individual retirement account, and the bank's transaction-processing systems.
"Integration provides a more seamless face to the customer," says CIBC's Lotz-Turner. What was once a tangle of applications can now provide a unified picture of customer activity.
Since banks differentiate themselves more by customer service than by products, the ability to provide customers with a complete view is critical, Lotz-Turner says.
CIBC already had links in place between many of its systems, but they were built manually, which made them costly to maintain and difficult to change. So the bank is looking at New Era of Networks Inc.'s MQSeries Integrator to solve the custom-integration problem. MQSeries Integrator sends data between applications and reformats the data so it can be read by other systems. It passes information directly from customer-interaction systems to back-end systems so that, for instance, if a customer buys a bond through a customer-facing application, the transaction is completed immediately and the money is debited from the customer's account.
Simplified Buying
While customer service is paramount in the financial services business, timely and accurate access to product information is a key differentiator in manufacturing. Customer access to product information was the motivation for Rockwell Automation's move to enterprise integration. The Milwaukee industrial automation supplier needed to make it easier for foreign customers to buy its products.
A customer in the Netherlands, for example, may want to purchase a generator that's subject to export and tariff laws. Before the purchase can go through, the customer needs to find out which laws apply to that product.
Before Rockwell's application-integration project, that meant accessing data on 106,000 parts from nine legacy applications. Rockwell implemented Convoy/DM, a data-conversion and integration product from Convoy Corp. that moves product and export-compliance data to a single integrated system. Product and financial data is stored in a PeopleSoft application, while tariff and export data resides in NextLinx's international compliance software. Convoy/DM connects the customer's warehouse-management software with Rockwell's product and tariff data.
Rockwell's customers now get all information in one system, instead of having to get it from disparate systems or from someone who may not be in the office that day, says Gordy Klindt, regional manager of Montclare Technology Partners, the consulting firm running the integration project.The buying process, which once took weeks, is now almost instantaneous. By bringing product and compliance data together, Rockwell can help customers make better-informed buying decisions. This ease of use should contribute directly to Rockwell's bottom line.
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Photo of Klindt by Joe Picciolo
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