Novus Streamlines Trading Partner Management with Business Integration Technology and Mule
Based on decades of research and development at Monsanto, Novus International, Inc. was formed in 1991 and employs over 350 people in more than 20 countries. Novus creates animal health and nutrition solutions based on science. Over 2000 clients in more than 80 countries trust the Novus product family to be an integral part of their daily animal agriculture operations. Novus’ mission is “To help feed the world affordable wholesome food.”
“We urgently needed to shift our logistic operations from a process that was manual phone and fax to electronic integration. Our goal was to automate the routine work so that our staff could spend their time trouble-shooting exceptions and focusing on logistics strategy for higher efficiency and lower cost.”
Mouche Marien, Logistics and Customer , Service Manager, Novus
“BIT believes that by working with MuleSoft, we will be able to offer additional choices that include more comprehensive support for our customers.”
Fred Domke, President, BIT
The Challenge
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New business initiatives resulted in dramatic increases in the volume of sales orders and shipments in Novus’ European operations. Novus Europe managed outbound customer shipments manually, printing and faxing documents, as well as telephoning transporters and warehouses directly to arrange shipping. As Novus experienced continued success in the European market, and especially in the increased order volume of packaged goods, the resources required would soon outstrip capacity of the logistics operation.
Although most of the 13 warehouses and 16 transporters wanted to communicate with Novus electronically, many did not have the required infrastructure. A change like this would require effort on their part to implement an integration solution. There was no funding for the trading partners’ projects. Each project needed to be perceived as beneficial to the warehouse or transporter as well as to Novus.
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The initial trading partner community consists of Novus, three warehouses, and five transporters that serve those warehouses. ‘Other’ represents the transporters and warehouses not integrated in the initial project.
Another issue was that Novus had a customized legacy enterprise application and anticipated implementation of a new enterprise resource planning system within the next two years. This plan dictated that the solution had to accommodate this change with minimal cost and effort.
The Results
BIT worked closely with both Novus Europe and Novus Information Technology to meet the challenges of each trading partner and integrate them into the enterprise process. BIT made sure that Novus Europe’s users and Novus Information Technology had the information and training necessary to monitor and operate the system.
Business results for Novus Europe:
- Reduction in manual effort
- Real time update
- Increased accuracy of data
- Existing staff can handle future growth
- Existing staff can spend more time assessing other opportunities for business productivity and growth
The Solution
With an internal staff working to capacity, the company looked for cost-effective integration expertise from an external partner. Novus International Project Global IT Lead Dave Ploch hired Business Integration Technology to assist in the design, development and implementation of an integration solution for their Novus Europe team.
Business Integration Technology implemented the Novus solution using an open source, standards-based architecture. Mule from MuleSoft plays the key role of an embedded enterprise service bus in EME, BIT’s enterprise messaging engine. Mule is the world’s most widely-used ESB and integration platform for moving and managing data between disparate enterprise systems. As the messaging backbone of choice for many of the world’s most high-performance, multi-protocol environments, Mule securely and reliably moves mission critical enterprise data. BIT and Novus chose Mule because Mule’s simplified programming model creates the same results as expensive proprietary applications at a fraction of the cost both in terms of software licenses and professional services. The open source code base allows solution providers like BIT to customize the product to meet their needs.
The Process
The solution provides Novus with a robust enterprise service bus (ESB) acting as the backbone for Novus Europe messaging. This solution is flexible in design and can provide for the accommodation of other Novus integration projects in the future. The solution leverages and builds upon BIT’s already proven Enterprise Messaging Engine (EME). Using EME as the foundation for the ESB solution allowed the integration architect to spend less time implementing the messaging infrastructure. All documents flowing on the ESB are in the Novus enterprise format. The Novus enterprise format is based on CIDX XML tailored to existing Novus business processes. This allowed for maximum flexibility in integrating to existing Novus systems and trading partners.
 This chart shows the range of additional capacity created by implementing one, two, and three of the initial warehouses with their associated transporters. |
The solution integrated eight high-value Novus transporters and warehouses. These trading partners varied in technological sophistication and required a variety of solutions on their end. Sophisticated trading partners were integrated using existing EME protocols such as FTP, HTTP and HTTPS. Unsophisticated trading partners were given a couple choices for solutions. A version of EME (EME-CIDX) suitable to run in their enterprise which includes custom web screens and is pre-configured to transmit business documents to Novus International. The other choice for a trading partner with the bare minimum of resources available was an email sent to them with an attached Web page for transmitting the required data back to Novus International.
The solution is able to process two inbound business documents: Load Tender Response and Ship Notice. It also processes three outbound business documents: Load Tender, Shipment Instructions, and Certificate of Analysis. And it processes Receipt Acknowledgments for each of the three outbound documents from the trading partners. All business documents are viewable from a “Business Documents Processor” (BDP) application. The solution implements XSL documents to produce user-friendly HTML for viewing these documents. All business documents will adhere to CIDX standards and are schema validated when entering and exiting the solution. CIDX protocol is followed for capable trading partners including XML enveloping and exchange of receipt acknowledgements. Trading partner documents are transformed to Novus enterprise format before being stored in BDP
About Business Integration Technology, Inc.
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Business Integration Technology Inc. (BIT) is a leader in B2B integration technology for transportation, logistics and supply chain management. BIT designs and implements highly cost-effective business-to-business connections that eliminate the costs of doing business with paper, phone and fax bringing innovative value to shippers, carriers, 3PLs and companies looking to improve cycle time and reduce cost.
