Arnott's
Nature of Project: Supply chain automation using Tibco.
Business Users: Warehousing and distribution.
Project Leader: Paul Williams, e-commerce manager.
Williams says the need for the project came out of the business, which was outsourcing warehouse and distribution in Victoria to a third party. The business told IT its requirements for sending orders, confirmations, invoices, receipts and so on to the third-party provider. The IT group then decided that to provide a fully-functional, secure solution it needed a really good, loosely coupled, B2B message-based integration and, as a direct-to-store supplier (DSD) to Woolworths, a good messaging system to send and receive EDI and to be able to process those messages. Middleware was the obvious solution.
The project team began the process of building a B2B infrastructure by identifying an "as is" map, a "to be" process, and a range of business rules that needed to be put in place for a number of electronic ordering and invoicing scenarios, along with some vendor-managed inventory scenarios.
"We began the process by doing a lot of workshops with the business on our current Â'as is' business processes. We drove it all from what the business rules were today and what they'd need to be under the various B2B scenarios that we were hoping to support with Tibco," Williams says. "For instance, we did a workshop all about the scenario of outsourcing to a third party.
"We got agreement from all the vice-presidents of the different functions that we would do these workshops under an accelerated timetable - we did them all over a period of three weeks - and that they would sign off on the outcomes of these workshops.
"Then we got nominated people from each department - finance, the customer service group, various supply chain logistics people, obviously IT, and sales and so on - into a room and workshopped what we do today: the step-by-step processes, for instance, from order through to dispatch of a product or from order through to invoice. This is at a business process level.
"We mapped out those processes - usually graphically - and then we asked: Â'What's it going to look like when we've got part of the process happening here and part happening over at a third party? What are the business rules that start coming in here? What do we need to know when it's not all in our system? How do we reconcile stock from a financial point of view? How do we make sure we still have a good view of the stock that we still own in a third party warehouse so that we can manage our deployment and our supply chain planning issues properly?'"The workshops, run by Williams in conjunction with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, were held every morning. In the afternoons the team wrote up all of the results of the workshops for distribution by the next morning. All the involved parties then had 48 hours to review the material, sign it and get back with any changes. The results were consolidated at the end of the first two weeks, then during the third week all participants signed off and added comments and the team did a presentation back to the vice-presidents of the business.
"You always, always have to get top-level management sign-off for it, and that is not always easy," Williams says. "In this case it was such a business-critical thing that everyone understood the gravity of the situation and the importance of doing it right. That enabled us to drive the urgency and really drive the agenda."
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.