Implementing automated data integration for consistency of CPQ & ERP
Noltic’s work helped the company decrease repeated manual labour. We automated order processing by connecting two separate systems and set up data formatting to match both their requirements.
The client is a global technology manufacturer of advanced radiofrequency (RF) components – antennas, connectors and other custom design services – that respond to a variety of needs in the IoT industry. The company is headquartered in Ireland and spreads across 9 locations worldwide. They excel in providing the building blocks to establish a stable connection on any level needed from their client’s end.
Their RF products help elevate mobility in public and industrial infrastructure with a wireless network; improve medtech, specifically telehealth and remote patient care; bring in easy navigation and tracking in logistics and transportation; set up smart safety equipment for municipal and industrial needs.
The company’s financial and resource tracking processes were out of sync due to using separate services for different needs. They used Hubspot as a CRM, Tacton to create quotes for customers (CPQ), and then there was the SAP Business One service to manage manufacturing resources (ERP).
After closing a deal with a customer, the team had to manually put the information from the order in the CPQ system into the ERP system. An additional challenge was having different logics of order items' part numbers in Tacton and SAP Business One.
A part number is a complex combination of purchased item characteristics like antenna impedance, cable length etc., and to recognize them, each system requires its own acceptable formats.
Our client knew precisely that they needed an integration layer to take on the manual labour and transfer orders data between the Tacton and SAP Business One systems. It was also important to make all the needed part number format adjustments in the process. Since Tacton easily connects with Hubspot CRM, it wasn’t necessary to build an integration between them. But it was preferable for our solution to also be compatible with the Hubspot technology in case the client ever needed to establish such a connection.
- Built a custom 2-process application with its own queuing management on an AWS hosted server;
- Implemented the first process – a standard web server endpoint receiving messages from Tecton about new or updated quote details coming from the customers’ orders;
- Implemented the second process – a backend unavailable from WEB to receive messages and data from the first process and maintain them in a database available from the customer’s end;
- Established an API connection with Tacton to receive various data combinations;
- Built a transformation layer in the second process that used the received combination of characteristics that identify the purchased product listed in the quote to generate a part number readable by the SAP Business One system;
- Consulted the customer on Amazon Elastic Container Registry – a modern and widely adopted technology that is able to significantly increase system persistence and reliability.
- Decreased daily manual work of the team through automation of part numbers processing between the environments;
- Preserved the usage of preferred separate ERP and CPQ systems by eliminating the roadblocks that complicated their simultaneous work;
- Introduced a solution fit to handle massive amounts of data – in case of an emergency-level volume of requests (more than 1,000,000 at a time) the second process can be automatically scaled by multiplying itself horizontally;
- Built a business environment with consistent data across multiple platforms allowing for new connections establishment including the customer’s Hubspot CRM;
- Increased security in the data transformation process using AWS best practices and custom assets – VPN, whitelisted IPs etc.
Customer success stories
Customer success stories
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