Driving Supply Chain Excellence Through Intelligent Automation

The Opportunity

The retail industry has seen major shifts over the years to a more streamlined and automated approach to supply chain management. For our client, a multi-national retailer, optimizing their procurement process was an opportunity to improve efficiency and reduce human involvement to free up resources for more strategic tasks

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The Challenge

The legacy system used a tiered approach to generating order quotes from suppliers across the globe and required manual intervention at every step for processing RFQ quotes. The retailer will request multiple vendors to submit quotes and the retailer was manually emailing for the submitted quotes. We aimed to automate this task and eliminate intermediate steps.

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The Solution

Our approach to solving this was based on reducing the number of navigation screens that were currently being used for emailing the suppliers for submitting quotes. We used IBM ODM Business rules to signal bamboo rose PLM to automatically fill in the supplier details from Merlin and for the emailing function.

To automate these processes, we used Apache Camel Framework and Java Webservices to signal Bamboo Rose to pick up details with Vendor ID from the vendor management module and send an email to the supplier for RFQ quotes to be reviewed by the procurement team.

The Impact

• Eliminated the need for manual processes and intermediate navigation screens.

• Successful IBM ODM Business rules deployment to automate email functionality.

• Reduced effort and time to manually process email requests to vendors and suppliers