Development of Automated Purchase Order Processing using Microsoft BizTalk Server

The Client
The client is an Auto Spare Parts supplier (referred as THE COMPANY), serving 500 Dealers and more than 3 thousand customers, has been using a web-based inventory management system over the Internet. Majority of spare parts were being delivered through a province-wide network of authorized outlets.

The Challenge
the company was having the complete process of manual entry of purchase order details into the system, its verification and emailing an invoice was time consuming. The challenge was to make the entire process faster, efficient and scalable according the expanding business need.

The Solution
Encodex began its search for a suitable solution to drive THE COMPANY e-processing initiative.

The conclusion: Microsoft BizTalk was the best way to go. BizTalk Server 2004 is a comprehensive solution that unites enterprise application integration, business-to-business integration and BizTalk Orchestration technology, allowing THE COMPANY to easily build dynamic business processes that span applications and organizational boundaries. BizTalk Server, the latest release in the Microsoft .NETTM Enterprise Server family, is a framework based on new Extensible Markup Language (XML) schemas and industry standards for sharing information.

We provided an integrated solution to THE COMPANY using BizTalk server 2004. The solution eliminates the emailing procedure and directly receives the purchase orders from the dealers, process it, generates the invoice and send it back to dealers for payment. The PO processing was achieved by using BizTalk server.

The PO processing shown in the figure 1 is as follows:

Here we see that using the BizTalk we have integrated the inventory & invoice applications though both are having different transport types & automated the business process.

Fully integrated Solution:
Using XML, BizTalk Server 2004 supports integration between systems, irrespective of the technologies involved. This ensures communication between any numbers of customers, with no significant architecture redesign.

Scalable Integration Architecture:
Because of the integration capabilities of BizTalk Server 2004 and the development benefits of the .NET Framework, transaction processes can be mapped and customized quickly and effectively.

Enhanced Customer Experience:
The system improves customer service by reducing incidences of human error in the ordering process. It also speeds transactions and streamlines the compilation and transmission of orders and confirmations.

Technology

• BizTalk server 2004
• SQL server 2000
• Microsoft .NET Framework