Customer Solution Case Study
/ Manufacturer Improves Customer Communication and Supply Chain Flow with Web Services
Overview
Country or Region:Canada
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
CCL Custom Manufacturing, a division of CCL Industries Inc., is one of the largest contract manufacturers of consumer products globally.
Business Situation
CCL needed an automated, fast, and accurate solution that would allow it to communicate more efficiently with its business partners.
Solution
Together, Microsoft Services and CCL developed a Web services-based solution that takes new purchase orders generated from its five plants across North America and posts it to a company Web site where suppliers can view the information.
Benefits
Instant, direct communication with partners
Reduced costs by eliminating need for duplicate order entry
Simple application development and editing / "Based on the success of the pilot program, we want to expand the use of Web services within other divisions of CCL."
Akhil Bhandari, CIO, CCL Industries Inc.
CCL Custom Manufacturing, a division of CCL Industries Inc., is one of the largest contract manufacturers of consumer products globally. As part of the company’s strategic initiative to improve the efficiency of its supply chain, CCL turned to Microsoft® .NET connection software, the Visual Studio® .NET development system, and BizTalk® Server to develop a self-service business portal for exchanging critical business information with suppliers and customers. Today, more than 40 percent of CCL’s purchasing transactions go through the business portal. Based on the success of this project, CCL began a pilot project with one of its key suppliers in which CCL was able to automate its supply chain, helping to save both time and money. This success and the ease-of-use of the development tools have inspired CCL to expand the solution into other divisions of the company.
Situation
CCL Custom Manufacturing, a division of CCL Industries Inc., provides manufacturing, packaging, and support services to the world’s leading marketers of brand name personal care, OTC pharmaceutical, specialty food, household, automotive, and industrial products. With headquarters in Toronto, Canada, CCL employs 7,000 people and operates 35 production facilities in North and Central America and in Europe.
As a contract manufacturer with no products of its own, CCL Custom Manufacturing fulfills a unique role within the industry. Liaising between suppliers and customers, the company services a wide variety of needs, from being part of customers’ production capacity to doing emergency production runs and overflows. As a result, CCL’s success is dependent on efficient communication and operations.
Approximately two-and-a-half years ago, the executive team at CCL determined the need for a strategic initiative to improve the efficiency of its supply chain. To find out where the greatest needs and opportunities existed, CCL interviewed more than 30 of its suppliers and customers. A number of issues were identified, but the one that came up most often was business communication.
Until recently, according to Al Hintz, Director of Information Systems at CCL Custom Manufacturing, efficient communication with customers and suppliers was a major challenge.
“Because of the type of business we are in, we would often have to bring a supplier’s system in-house, connecting to them only through their own system,” says Hintz. “Not only did we have to enter order information into our own reporting system, but we had to enter the same information again for them, which added a lot of work on our end and created opportunities for mistakes.”
In addition, information exchange with suppliers was inefficient. Purchase orders were phoned or faxed to suppliers, which was a very time-consuming process.
“It was difficult to manage the purchasing system when somebody would have to print the purchase order, then fax it over to the supplier, then phone to make sure they got it,” says Tom Tulk, Business Systems Analyst at CCL Custom Manufacturing. “We wasted a lot of time trying to contact someone, and it was easy to miss something important.”
To address these issues, CCL looked into building a simple portal, but soon realized that a portal alone was not the solution the company needed. Although information could be easily posted by CCL to a Web site, the customer or supplier would still be required to take that information off the site and input it into their own system—meaning data would still be entered twice, leaving room for error.
As a result, CCL decided it needed to implement a true business-to-business communication system, where its information would go directly into a partner’s system. “Whether it would be a supplier accepting a purchase order or a customer approving an invoice, we wanted a system where the information would be delivered accurately and efficiently and would be untouched by human hands,” says Hintz.
After contemplating a number of options, the executive team at CCL made a strategic decision to use Microsoft® technologies. “We had three specific criteria when we were looking for the right solution to our challenges,” says Akhil Bhandari, CIO of CCL Industries. “First of all, we wanted to adopt a technology that would be around for many years to come. The selected technology also had to be pervasive in the marketplace so that we had access to a highly available skill set. Finally, we wanted to ensure that the knowledge transfer from the implementation partner to our employees would be easy. Microsoft .NET met each of these criteria.”
Solution
CCL hired Microsoft Services to develop a secure business portal for suppliers. With more than 100 offices and just under 4,000 consultants worldwide, Microsoft Services helps customers align IT vision and business goals.
Together, Microsoft Services and CCL developed a solution that takes new purchase orders generated from CCL’s five plants across North America, which use a JD Edwards-powered business system, and posts it to the Web site where suppliers can view the information. This solution also includes sending an e-mail to the supplier notifying them that there is a new purchase order. Once the supplier has looked at the order and made a decision about whether or not they can fill it as requested, an e-mail is sent back to CCL acknowledging the order.
According to Tulk, CCL opted to use Microsoft BizTalk® Server and the Microsoft Visual Basic® 6.0 development system instead of EDI to create the solution, given that EDI technology is likely to be outdated and can be expensive to use, as there is a fee for every transaction. As the project moved forward, however, Microsoft Services recommended the Microsoft .NET Framework as a more advanced solution.
“We suggested moving the project to the .NET Framework because ASP.NET provides the ability to develop applications more quickly, deploy them as Web services with very little additional work, and offers increased debugging capabilities. These components should be leveraged by everyone developing Web applications,” says Guy Lau, Consultant at Microsoft Services.
CCL decided to use .NET technologies because the solution leveraged the Internet. “We decided to use the .NET Framework—which included Visual Studio® .NET, BizTalk Server, and XML Web services—to transmit our files, because it just made better business sense,” says Tulk.
“Using .NET has allowed us to move to the next technological level, without forcing all of our business partners to do anything in particular. Instead of faxing and phoning purchase orders to our suppliers, now we are seeing more than 40 percent of all our purchase orders going through the Web,” he adds.
Safeguarding data is a concern for all companies, but becomes a primary concern for companies like CCL that deal with customer-supplied data. To help ensure the security of each transaction, CCL developed its solution on Microsoft security features to suit the company’s specific business needs.
“We built security into the solution using Visual Studio .NET to ensure that suppliers could see all the information they needed, but only their own information. That was a critical component of this project,” says Hintz.
After the initial success of using the .NET Framework to automate and streamline the supply chain, CCL decided to take supplier communication to the next level. The company decided to undertake another project that would allow purchase orders and transactional data to be directly interfaced with a supplier’s system using XML Web services.
“We embarked on a pilot program with one of our key suppliers, Dow Corning, where all of our orders were being transmitted directly from our JD Edwards program into their SAP system by using XML. This was the first time we’d used Web services, and we’re very excited about the possibilities of having direct, secure, and instant communication with a supplier,” says Hintz.
The project achieved all of CCL’s communication goals, and the company plans to offer this capability to another four suppliers in the coming year.
Benefits
By automating the purchase order system using .NET, CCL was able to streamline the supply chain, reduce operating costs, and communicate instantly with partners. As well, using Visual Studio .NET as the development tool enabled CCL programmers to develop and make changes to the code for the business portal quickly and easily.
Immediate Communication
Unlike the previous manual and time-consuming order process, XML Web services and the business portal solution built with Visual Studio .NET provide CCL with direct communication with business partners. In a business where timing is crucial and communication is the key to operations, this is a significant improvement. Not only has it saved time and money for CCL, but also reduced the amount of work for the company’s partners, which has helped improve partner satisfaction.
Cost Reduction
For a manufacturing company, if there is one missing ingredient or component, the entire production process is thrown off schedule, resulting in delayed shipments and unhappy customers. With the self-service business portal solution, CCL no longer worries about misplaced information. CCL also has realized cost savings by eliminating the need for duplicate data entry or to spend hours trying to track down orders.
“Now, no purchase orders or purchase order changes are lost, and when you’re in our kind of business, that means significant savings,” says Hintz.
Development Made Simple
Although Tulk had never used Visual Studio .NET to design an application before, he found it to be quite straightforward. “Visual Studio .NET is mature to the point that it is simple for programmers to learn this technology, even if they’ve never used it before. I could easily understand how it worked and how to modify code to suit my needs, unlike older software I have dealt with in the past. I can make it work, which means I don’t have to hire consultants, and this saves us a great deal of money.”
Visual Studio .NET also eliminated programmer difficulty in editing applications, which helped increase development efficiency and productivity. “In the early days of Internet technology, when someone created a great application, it was very difficult to edit or even get access to the code that was being used,” says Tulk. “With Visual Studio .NET, it’s considerably easier to go in to see the program and make modifications. This is a big time savings, especially if you’re looking to copy the solution and use it for another project.”
Looking Ahead
Due to the success of both projects, CCL is committed to using the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET in all future projects.
“I am going to be using Visual Studio .NET whenever I develop new applications or add new Web pages to our portal. It’s the best technology for these types of projects,” says Tulk.
Hintz agrees. “Once we went live with the Web site, we never had to turn back. Then we went live with the XML Web services and experienced the same success. We will definitely pursue this solution with other suppliers and customers in the future.”
CCL also plans to expand the system into other divisions of the company. “Based on the success of the pilot program, we want to expand the use of Web services within other divisions of CCL,” says Bhandari. “We also want to use this platform for the system-to-system XML-based interface of key transactional data, which will improve the speed of business and reduce our costs.”
Bhandari adds, “I can see this solution evolving beyond the exchange of just transactional information. I would like to see us using this technology to enhance our collaborative processes with trading partners, [processes] such as product development, logistics, and capacity planning.”
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows(r) component for building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services.
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