Solution overview

This overview focuses on the IBM^(R) WebSphere^(R) Business Integration Express for Item Synchronization solution, which automatically integrates a supplier's item business processes with those of its trading partners. The solution uses the Collaboration for Consumer Products Item Synchronization, Adapters, and the InterChange Server Express (ICS), to provide affordable, extensible, scalable, and secure access to the UCCnet standard registry. (A subsidiary of the Uniform Code Council, Inc. (UCC), UCCnet is a neutral, tax-exempt organization that provides item registry and data synchronization for electronic commerce based on industry developed standards.) The resulting improved efficiencies in supply chains can significantly drive down costs and improve profits for suppliers.

Challenges for suppliers

Today's suppliers face many challenges. An enterprise's business processes and associated operations can be stretched to the breaking point as a result of:

Constantly shifting economic conditions
Technologically complex and cumbersome planning, forecasting, buying, and inventory management processes
Impacts from growth, acquisitions, mergers, and expansion

To meet the escalating data demands on suppliers, UCCnet has implemented multi-industry standards for product identification and related electronic communications. It implements these standards by requiring its community of trading partners to provide standardized item data in particular formats to its registry. The system also includes integral compliance checks to assure the integrity of the data in all cases. By subscribing to the UCCnet registry, suppliers can potentially change prices in near real-time and greatly improve their speed-to-retail-shelf for new products and item maintenance.

For suppliers to work effectively with UCCnet, they must be able to synchronize their enterprise item data with UCCnet systems quickly and easily, without the need to rewrite or replace existing systems. They must be able to extract business information from diverse sources and move this information through disparate applications quickly and accurately to keep item information current. Plus, they must be able to get up and running on the UCCnet registry quickly with minimal disruption to their current business processes and enterprise systems.

How the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Express for Item Synchronization solution meets these challenges

The IBM WebSphere Business Integration Express for Item Synchronization solution meets these challenges by helping suppliers automate the item synchronization process in compliance with UCCnet standards. The heart of this modular, open-systems-based solution is the Collaboration for Consumer Products Item Synchronization. This collaboration, composed of pre-built templates, enables suppliers to automatically add, change, or correct items in the global registry. This collaboration also provides the ability to publish item and price data to trading partners via UCCnet Services. Thus, a supplier's enterprise data is synchronized with item data sent outside the enterprise.

The solution's benefits to suppliers include:

Quick eanUCCnet and UCCnet format compliance, with the flexibility to connect to other partners and vendors.
Back-end and legacy integration for true business process management without the need to write changes to existing data and application environments.
The ability to stage a common or "catalog" view of item attribute data mapped and integrated from multiple systems of record within an enterprise.
Fast deployment, simplified application upgrades, and reusability of both business process flows and application access code.
Improved speed to market.
Seamless, real-time updates to existing product records, along with immediate acceptance and setup of new and delisted items.
Message transformation, message routing, guaranteed message delivery, as well as orchestrated workflows around closed-loop and secure business process executions.
A fully extensible framework to support tomorrow's new processes and partners.

For more detailed information about solution components, architecture, and installation, see the following:

Solution Development Guide, which describes the internal processing of the solution and the collaboration templates included with the solution.
Installation guide, for instructions on setting up the solution.