About Garcia Jeans
Garcia Jeans is a European clothing wholesaler that offers authentic Italian denim fashion at an honest price. As the company’s business expanded, its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems lacked the necessary visibility and mobile data access for sales representatives. Working with us, Garcia Jeans deployed Red Hat JBoss Fuse to integrate and automate application components and data. As a result, the company established a more accurate, flexible fashion design and supply chain for both its employees and its customers.
Benefits of System Integration:
- Reduced order processing time by 50% with automated data integration to deliver real-time sales transactions
- Improved mobile data access, resulting in lower sample costs by reducing necessary sample production by 75%
- Achieved faster incident resolution times to improve its customer experience
Speeding legacy systems to meet growing business needs
As the company’s growth reached 20% annually, they saw that their legacy systems and processes could not keep pace with this rapid expansion.
“We had aging SAP interfaces that were difficult to maintain and old techniques that lacked visibility into processes like data transfer,” says Pieter Jan Rombout, Chief Financial Officer of Garcia Jeans. “We wanted to find a better method of integrating our systems. Notably one that provides more transparency.”
Garcia Jeans uses two core IT platforms: Styling to manage product development from conception to creation and SAP to manage transactions. However, communication between these interdependent systems lagged behind the speed of business. In addition, the company needed to integrate a new order entry tool into its sales and design cycles without causing delays. Also when an individual clothing article moved from Styling to SAP, the underlying interaction script only updated every 24 hours, meaning there was a huge delay in change processing.
Integrating systems for seamless performance
Because real-time integration and interoperability between the company’s platforms was needed, Red Hat JBoss Fuse was implemented: a lightweight integration platform with pattern-based core integration infrastructure. This way, Garcia Jeans could benefit from a standardized architecture, and tools to integrate its application components, for seamless communication and operations.
Firstly, an interface was made between the existing order entry application and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, leading to a more effective mobile order entry application. ilionx (voorheen Rubix) and Red Hat worked with the application developer to plot a roadmap, identify risks and ensure success. The deployment was completed within a strict two-month time frame.
Result: With this new order entry tool, 150 users, including traveling sales representatives, can more easily manage inventory and promote the company’s wide range of clothing.
Results
Automated, scalable integration – With Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Garcia Jeans now has automated, real-time data transfer between systems. Eliminating manual effort makes the company’s data transfer faster and more efficient, particularly for mobile employees. The new IT environment can also easily scale to ensure integrated systems accommodate growing data needs.
“Previously, we needed considerable manual work to connect our orders with our supply chain. Processing a sale could take over an hour. Now the process takes half the time, which means our workforce can be far more productive. Product data, such as clothing item components, can easily be added to the SAP environment and then assembled”
Improved mobile data access – With its new order entry system, Garcia Jeans salespeople can easily use mobile devices to visually display different colors, cuts, and styles, with instant remote access to high resolution images of every item in all of the company’s collections. This improved data access eliminates the need to transport and manage physical clothing samples.
“Before, if we had 250 articles in a range, we would need to carry each of those to prospective buyers. With Red Hat JBoss Fuse, we built an interface that gives buyers a virtual view of different variations of one sample, instead of needing four samples per product. That capability creates huge financial savings and helps us easily demonstrate differences in real time.”
In addition, representatives can now use the system to directly place customer orders in real time through an intuitive user interface. The old order entry system was not easily accessible by the many sales reps working across Europe, particularly on mobile devices. With the integration layer and the first order system in place, all of their interfaces will be migrated to that integration layer, thus replacing all existing supplier links within a few years, ensuring better data access for all of the sales reps.
Faster incident resolution – By integrating its systems with Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Garcia Jeans has significantly reduced its support time when issues arise. Previously, changes could only be made in single daily batches. Now, their IT interface instantly detects issues for faster resolution.