Serena Lum

-Serena Lum, Director of Information Technology, SONICblue

OVERVIEW

Our trading partners are at different levels of sophistication , with some of them using EDI ( Electronic Data Interchange ) , while others use mail or fax , said Serena Lum , Director of Information Technology at SONICblue.

Although SONICblue had already automated its internal inventory systems with Oracle applications running on the Sun platform , gaining visibility into the demand chain was challenging because of the wide variation in reporting systems and methods employed among its channel partners.To sort and gather all the data , which included inventory that was already sold , on-hand , or in transit for each product , was a long process , said Lum , who added , By the time the process was done , the data could be up to three weeks old..

Given the company's new focus on consumer markets , and the volatile nature of consumer electronics products , such as the Rio players , developing real-time windows on product supply and demand became mission-critical.

Bowstreet enabled SONICblue to use a supply chain reporting application as a standard Web service.It was the only software provider that could provide a single , Web based XML gateway to converge and standardize the way our data would be gathered and disseminated , noted Lum.We knew this was the way to go , because it added new functionality atop of what we were already getting from our Oracle and EDI systems..

Because the supply chain Web services are mission-critical to SONICblue , it relied on Sun for an end-to-end infrastructure solution that was designed around high availability.The environment includes two 4-way Sun Enterprise 450 servers to run the Bowstreet Web services , plus a pair of additional Sun Enterprise 450 servers for the LDAP services.Each server was configured for failover at the application level to provide the necessary reliability.The same design principle was applied to data storage , which includes Sun SPARCStorage [ tm ] Arrays with 168 GB capacity.
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Bowstreet's professional services were among the best consultants that I've worked with , said Lum , who noted , They were very professional and committed , and were always on time..

Opening the Window

With their business Web in place , channel partners , sales managers , and key executives gained real-time windows into inventory , order , and shipment status.More importantly , these services are just the beginning.On the horizon , SONICblue plans to tighten its trading relationships even further , extending Web services to areas such as supplier pricing commitments.In addition , a new integration tool will be implemented that will allow SONICblue partners to plug this application directly into their respective intranets.
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The Bowstreet Business Web Factory has empowered our IT department to automate the creation and management of multiple solutions to the business community using a single business Web application development platform , noted Lum.With the new solution , SONICblue will be able to seamlessly extend its supply chain desktop to its business partners.We are limited only by our imagination of its usage , Lum said.

Bowstreet and Sun worked closely with us on our go-live strategy , Lum added.They designed a robust architecture that would take us through our planned growth over the next couple of years..