Project Portfolio

ERP and Cloud systems integration

eCommerce Integrations and Analytics with iPaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

The end client is one of the biggest healthcare providers in an EU country on a strategic transformation of their middleware and integration estate.

Multiple vendors were involved in the overall program, and Singhpora Consulting was engaged by the lead contractor to develop some key integrations.

Category: Integration, e-commerce, ERP, Data analytics
Main Technologies involved: Oracle Integration Cloud iPaaS (OIC), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Commerce Cloud (OCC), Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher SaaS, (OBI), Rest API's, Java Cloud Service (JCS), Oracle Developer Cloud, and more
Project was delivered on time and in budget. This led to customer requests for more deliverables!

Reliable messaging & error resilience

Reliable messaging, error handling setup and testing, implementation of good development and release practices

Background: The client is a major port responsible for some of the largest shipping traffic in Eurasia. They used the Oracle Service Bus 12c as their integration platform for some of their important integration flows.
The platform consisting of the Weblogic domain was deployed on in-house infrastructure. There were gaps in development practices, such as lack of release notes, adequate unit test coverage, or source control practices (e.g. *.sbar deployable bundles were directly added to SVN, and environment specific customization/configuration files had not been used). In general, the integration flows were over-complicated, lacked modularity, and had sub-optimal runtime behaviour. The most pressing problem for which the client sought Singhpora Consulting's expertise occurred at runtime: Any momentary or prolonged downtime of the target system, or a sporadic network outage, coincided with message loss. According to the customer's own estimates, up to 10% of messages received from their source system (a core shipping system) were not accounted for.

Client: A major UK port with global operations
Category: Integration, reliable messaging, publish-subscribe, Oracle, service bus, shipping
Project outcomes:
Complete review of the customer's existing environment and integration flow codebase
Set up of formal source control, build, and release processes
Refactor of the complete code-base for maintainability and good development practices
Solved a long-standing issue with message loss at times of target system downtime
Supported testing, verification, and production releases of the re-designed code
Advised the customer on future plans and further enhancements

Orders, shipment, and warehouse process digitisation

Integration and process orchestration for multiple usecases from order import into ERP, to shipments and customer notifications. Digitisation of warehouse processes had a transformative impact on the business.

Background: The client is a retail organisation with approximately 150 physical stores. As part of their multi-channel e-commerce strategy, the customer wished to digitise their end-to-end businesses processes from Order import to shipment. A number of ad-hoc operational flows in the warehouse were digitised, streamlined, and a few automated.
This directly led to better traceability, reduced errors, efficiency in multiple departments, reduced times from order to fulfillment, and better customer experience.

Order Import Process depicted in BPMN notation

At the start of the project, the biggest challenge for Singhpora Consulting was to identify and map the customer's business processes in a manner that could be broken down into more granular business services. BPMN allowed us to define these processes in a notation that customer-side stakeholders could easily identify. This then allowed us to define, develop, and deliver reusable business services at the right level of granularity that could be orchestrated in the right sequence.

The business services had clean, implementation-agnostic API's and modular, decoupled, platform-agnostic implementations. Warehouse and Shipment Process depicted in BPMN notation

A second challenge we faced was that the customer-managed SOA/middleware platform was not very well maintained. Recurring issues and outages were common. So, in addition to delivering the business functionality, we had to first stabilise the platform.
Using our knowledge and expertise, we identified a number of root causes, and fixed these to ensure that we had a stable target environment to deploy new functionality.
Our high quality Software Engineering practices ensured that the customer was able to avoid vendor lock-in with any specific platform.
They eventually did successfully migrate their processes and services to middleware from a different vendor, and eventually, to an iPaaS cloud platform.

Implementation depicted in a UML sequence diagram

The UML sequence diagram above depicts the actual API's developed and delivered to the customer, along with their orchestration to realise the business processes

Client: A retail company with multi-channel e-commerce and physical stores
Category: Integration, process orchestration, BPM, BPMN, SaaS, iPaaS, Cloud, SOA, Middleware, Shipping, Finance, e-commerce
Project outcomes:
Technical stabilisation of the customer's SOA environment
Digitisation of warehouse processes (picking, automated customs document printing, automation of shipping label printing, integration with shipping partners like DHL)
End to end process orchestration from Order import to shipping
High quality, vendor-agnostic Software Engineering
Supported testing, verification, and production releases

MAIN Projects Portfolio

ERP and Cloud systems integration

Reliable messaging & fault tolerance

Orders, shipment, and warehouse process digitisation

Multi-channel eCommerce processes