With a future-ready, high-availability platform supporting its trading partner integration processes, Niagara Bottling can continue moving forward into new markets and business models with confidence.
“Although it has never actually happened to us, we estimate that it would take us between one and two hours to rebuild our EDI databases from a backup after an unplanned outage,” explains Gonzalez. “If that were to happen, IBM MQ would queue up all of our EDI transactions while we worked to bring our system back online. Crucially, our trading partners would never even know anything was wrong: they’d continue to receive their MDNs regardless of the status of our EDI environment.”
Chen adds: “Some of our most demanding clients require that our EDI systems are never offline — even for planned maintenance windows. With our multi-node architecture, we can perform upgrades on half of the nodes in our cluster at a time — leaving the other half online to continue processing messages without interruption. As we continue to add new partners and grow our EDI volumes, these capabilities will definitely help us to maintain very high levels of service.”
Niagara Bottling’s modular IBM Sterling B2B Integrator architecture is already enabling it to adapt to evolving partner requirements in a more nimble and cost-efficient way.
“We recently engaged a new banking partner, who offered to manage our invoicing and reconciliation processes on our behalf — lightening our back-office workload,” Gonzalez comments. “To deliver these value-added services, the bank required an AS2 protocol with an additional SSL certificate and credentials.
“If the business had asked us to deliver these capabilities in our previous single-node environment, it would have been practically impossible to achieve without major interruption to our services — but thanks to our modular architecture, we were able to bolt on the new functionalities in a fast and straightforward way.”
Looking to the future, Niagara Bottling is planning to deploy new capabilities to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of its trading partner integration processes.
“We are very interested in extending our use of IBM Sterling Control Center, which we currently use to help monitor our B2B processes and detect potential errors,” says Gonzalez. “In the longer term, we see potential to use IBM Sterling Control Center alerts to trigger actions such as a rolling restart of all of our EDI nodes. This would enable us to remediate some technical issues with almost zero human involvement, freeing our personnel to focus on delivering value-added services.”
As a member of the IBM Preview Program, Niagara Bottling is evaluating artificial intelligence (AI) solutions such as IBM Watson® with interest.
“We want to harness the intelligence of IBM Watson to enable greater self-service for our partner community,” Gonzalez continues. “By deploying solutions such as IBM Sterling Business Transaction Intelligence and IBM Sterling Supply Chain Insights, we could enable our users to type in their questions about the status of a B2B message in natural language and receive answers in real time. At the moment, we spend multiple hours each day digging through our data to find answers to these kinds of questions—and an IBM Watson solution could potentially save us hundreds of hours per year.”
He concludes: “Our main challenge is: ‘how do we manage sustained growth effectively?’, which is a great challenge to have. Thanks to our work with IBM, we are confident that we’ve created a trading partner integration platform that will meet our needs for at least the next decade to come.”