The J.R. Simplot Company likes to describe itself as "bringing earth's resources to life." The private agribusiness, based in Boise, Idaho, operates farms and ranches, potato and vegetable processing plants, agricultural fertilizer production, and services for growers and farmers. With annual revenues of $3.4 billion, Simplot is one of the largest and fastest-growing private enterprises in the country.

As its business has expanded, Simplot has updated its technology infrastructure to keep up. In the run-up to the year 2000, the company had a series of separate non-integrated systems in its various divisions, hindering its ability to aggregate data into a single, comprehensive financial view of the entire enterprise, as well as to share data from division to division. The company conducted a review of five leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and chose J.D. Edwards and the System i, with DB2 as the database.

Issues to Tackle

With its new operating platform, the company identified two issues to address. The first concerned the integration of third-party applications. Because of the distinctive nature of its diverse businesses, Simplot needed to augment its J.D. Edwards ERP software with specialty third-party applications, such as IBM's Data Collection System for the warehouse management needs of its food group and the I-many Contract Management System to implement pricing and contract information for its dealings with food brokers and customers. Simplot quickly had several such special-purpose third-party applications, each of which had to be custom-integrated with J.D. Edwards.

Those custom integrations were time consuming, each taking hundreds and even thousands of hours to implement. The investments weren't one-time propositions. Each time either the third-party applications or J.D. Edwards ERP software was upgraded, Simplot had to update the integration.

The second issue facing the company concerned the thousands of electronic business-to-business messages it used every day. These messages consist of customer orders, order confirmations, warehouse shipping notices, and inventory information, as well as transportation and shipment location information, all of which must be passed to the J.D. Edwards ERP software.

One popular choice for doing this through electronic data interchange (EDI) was Gentran software by Sterling Commerce. This approach had been in place at the Simplot Company for years, but the software was scheduled to lose support on the System i platform. The replacement offering, GIS, would have required an implementation as an enterprise application integration (EAI) tool, but it wasn't on the company's short list for such tools.

Business messaging was an important part of the Simplot vision. It saw coordination of supply-chain activities, through business messaging, as crucial to many of its commodity-based businesses. It also saw connectivity with customers and supply-chain partners—-especially when those customers and partners didn't support EDI—-as crucial for the company's continued and increased competitiveness.

Simplot had also been working with a business-to-business third-party managed services provider, which had sharply reduced the company's cost of transmitting and receiving EDI messages over the Internet. Simplot also saw the use of XML-based messaging and the exchange of XML-based documents with customers, suppliers, service providers, and others as part of its business messaging vision.

A Plan of Attack

The consensus solution that emerged was based on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, the business process management server that lets companies automate and optimize business processes. To address the integration issue, Simplot decided that BizTalk Server 2006, as an EAI tool, would serve as a single integration point between the J.D. Edwards software and the company’s third-party applications, eliminating the need to manage a growing number of custom integrations.

BizTalk Server 2006 includes 23 application and technology adapters in the box for connecting to legacy systems (mainframe and mid-range) and line-of-business applications—-including the J.D. Edwards software that Simplot uses. The business decided that BizTalk Server would provide the scalability the company needed to support its growing number of integrations, as well as support an additional ERP system that Simplot was running for one of its lines of business. BizTalk Server would also provide flexibility for handling EDI over the Internet. As an added bonus, the price was right.

The solution uses a single inbound and single outbound BizTalk Server orchestration based on XML to move business messaging information between J.D. Edwards and Simplot's trading partners. About 35 EDI maps support the orchestrations. A scheduler kicks off EDI transactions every 15 minutes. The solution currently supports 1.1 million transactions annually.

Good News

Simplot has seen drastic reductions in the time and cost of implementing integrations between J.D. Edwards and its third-party solutions and in the time it takes to produce reports for business users. Best of all, the solution is a foundation for an end-to-end supplier-to-customer value chain that will help to increase customer service while decreasing costs.

Simplot wanted to reduce the thousands of person-hours it took to manage its growing range of point-to-point connections among applications. With BizTalk Server, it has the potential to accomplish this as an integration process that formerly took months has been cut to weeks.

That in turn means that Simplot's IT department can add and update connections as quickly as the company's lines of businesses need them, eliminating a potential drag on the company's ability to adopt and maintain business solutions that deliver competitive advantage.

With its improved data warehouse and reporting capabilities, Simplot sees a range of additional benefits. It can now create reports that formerly took two weeks or more to complete in just days, reducing the burden on the IT department and getting reports into the hands of business users much faster than before.

Faster report creation also means that business users will have a broader range of reports with which to work, providing greater support for decision-making. The move to BizTalk Server and SQL Server also provides a more strategic benefit to Simplot, which has cut the time needed to react to new customer needs.

Find out more about Simplot's experience by reading the complete case study.