Industry: Clothing & Footwear
Mark`s is a part of the Canadian Tire group of companies and is regarded as a leading brand providing extraordinary clothing and footwear in Canada. Mark`s offer customers exclusive private labels and Canada’s best sellers in men’s and women’s casual and business wear, outdoor apparel, and workwear.
Mark`s has shown significant growth starting from one store in 1977 to over 380 stores across the country.
Mark`s desire to generate more revenue by driving profitable sales by adding more customer-facing functions, larger product assortment, better fulfillment rate/speed and better online merchandising management functions. Target was to grow online presence both to the web and store.
As part of the mark`s re-launch, different components needed to be installed such as:
Components listed above are all highly function-oriented separate entities that need to communicate with each other extensively, the following concerns were upraised:
To address the above-mentioned concerns, Allied consultants proposed ESB based enterprise integration solution.
The solution was architected to guarantee that the business rules are externalized and functionality is componentized to promote flexibility, scalability, and reuse.
All applications/components and services in the enterprise were linked to the ESB layer to communicate with each other over the ESB using SOA standards. EAI technologies such as adapters were used to integrate with Moneris and JDA.
ESB layer handled routing details, mediation of differences and physical details of communication. Business logic and physical details in ESB were made highly configurable based on properties files.
For Asynchronous interactions, where the sender and receiver of the message did not need to interact with each other at the same time, MQ Queue was used between the sender and ESB layer.
For massive data transfer where a real-time update was not required, ETL technology was used to compliment ESB layer. IBM Datastage was used for this purpose.
Other than answering the concerns mentioned above related to virtualization, transformation, routing, validation, event handling, interaction, and security enforcement, ESB based solution has benefited Mark`s in numerous dimensions related to cost, performance and flexibility. The solution reduced discrepancies during real-time transactions, enhanced customer satisfaction. All error handling is being done at ESB layer, making exception processing extremely fast that resulted in revenue savings. Development time and cost is highly reduced because of framework`s ability to change with more pace based on business requirements. Mark`s expected to generate $8 Million in revenue the first year solution was implemented, growing to over $20 Millions in next 5 years.
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