|
|
| Success Story |
|
| Client: |
IKON Office Solutions |
| Project: |
Enterprise Resource Planning
Employing Oracle Financial Applications
|
Financial
At IKON Office Solutions we were faced with integrating about 20 external systems with Oracle's Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger, and Purchasing applications. Rather than writing distinct interfaces for each module, we analyzed the properties of all the applications' in-flows and out-flows. This led us to develop the interface engine that has become the standard technique for communicating with Oracle's Financial Applications at IKON. This technique basically establishes a meta-data layer to define the properties associated with each external system's data components. This information is read as arguments to the interface engine that contains embedded processing rules to read, process, and deliver the data to the Open Interface structures provided by Oracle.
Distribution
IKON is engaged in a multi-year effort to deploy the entire suite of Oracle's e-Business applications. However, the day-to-day business functioned on a COBOL based legacy system that needed to receive and transmit data with Oracle's applications. We expanded the functionality of our interface engine to include the use of some advanced communication features included with the Oracle database. To communicate with the legacy system we set up database-pipes between the two machines. These pipes remained opened so that information could flow between the systems. Each time activity was triggered, we used Oracle's Pro*COBOL interface to read and write data within the legacy system. This application enabled Orders and scheduled time information to flow between the legacy system's order entry application, and Oracle's Purchasing and Inventory modules.
Human Resources
IKON Office Solutions is a company that has grown through acquisitions. This has led to a Human Resources challenge to understand as many as 190 different cultures, and to unify them under a single corporate identity and rule-set. As a component of the Human Resources Application deployment, we devised a common Employee Maintenance System into which all employee data was fed. During the transition to an "All Oracle" HR environment, we provided the logic to integrate into Oracle HR, all of the company's disparate information. This technique was applauded at all levels of the organization for its smoothness while preventing any disruption employee and payroll information.
|
|
|
