ACAL BFi Case Study

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Inventory Management

Services

System Integration
Software Design & Engineering Services

The Challenge

ACAL BFi, a pan-European technical distributor, was facing challenges with its existing coding-based integration system. The system was proving to be unreliable and required too many technical resources, making it unmanageable as the company looked to scale. The company needed a standard platform to reduce the costs and resources required to provide a single view of the company’s ERP and CRM data. The integration was key to reliably and efficiently allowing ACAL BFi to see a 360-degree view of their customers and inventory, whether their users were working out of their JD Edwards ERP or Netsuite CRM applications.

About The Customer

ACAL BFi is a pan-European technical distributor with specialist skills and in-house services which allow OEMs to minimize time-to-market during concept development, prototyping and manufacturing. The company has specialist teams that help OEMs to create new revenue streams by using emerging technologies in a number of key vertical sectors. These sectors include wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networking, defense and aerospace, medical, industrial, telecommunications, offshore and security. ACAL BFi's services are crucial for OEMs looking to reduce their time-to-market and leverage emerging technologies to create new revenue streams.

The Solution

ACAL BFi turned to Jitterbit to provide an easy to use, rapid to deploy integration platform on which to standardize their data synchronization. Jitterbit was used to synchronize hundreds-of-thousands of customer, the company’s ERP and CRM data. The solution involved creating a seamless integration between NetSuite CRM, JD Edwards, and a local MySQL database. Jitterbit rapidly syncs over 200,000 customer, booking, billing and item records. In addition, Jitterbit is used to replicate data from both systems into a local database that provides rapid look-up capabilities. In the future, ACAL BFi has plans to expand its use of Jitterbit to integrate its marketing system and customer facing web portal.

Operational Impact

ACAL BFi now has a standardized integration platform that is faster and more flexible than coding.
Sales and marketing now have 360-degree visibility to data in the ERP system of record.
Rapid deployment has made possible new plans to integrate web portal and marketing application.