Business First Automates Entry of Orders

"iBOLT helped us to deliver on the vision of our original implementation by providing a smooth running business process between OneTrak and SAP Business One."

Ross Unger, Principal Consultant, Business-First

Overview

A US database and marketing services provider, operating in over 10 states, has a 24 year history of providing advanced information processing services, including database hosting and sophisticated modeling to help over 500 retail companies.

Challenge

The Company first implemented SAP® Business One in 2005 and has 10 professional and 55 CRM users on the system. It also acquired the OneTrak Product Configurator, which allows the Company’s client-facing and production personnel to use an Internet browser to select from more than 50,000 possible combinations of products. Both SAP Business One and the OneTrak Product Configurator were acquired from Business-First, a SAP Business One total solution provider and iBOLT Special Edition (SE) partner based in Chicago and Minneapolis.

Automated integration did not exist between OneTrak and SAP Business One, so all orders received over the web had to be manually re-entered into SAP. As a result of significant growth in the Company’s business, this was quickly becoming more than a full-time job, with all of the potential risks of manual data entry.

The Company loved SAP Business One and the OneTrak Product Configurator and simply needed a way to get them working together in an automated fashion.

Solution

The Company needed a solution that could automate the entry of orders entered through the OneTrak application into SAP Business One, and Business-First recommended using iBOLT special edition for SAP Business One to do the job.

Using iBOLT, and its built-in adapter designed especially for SAP Business One, Business-First was able to avoid expensive programming. Using visual editors and drill-down dialogs, they created an iBOLT flow that polled the OneTrak database for a status change when an order is ready for billing. The information is then exchanged between OneTrak and SAP Business One so that an invoice can be issued promptly to the customer.

"Our implementation of the iBOLT flow took only four or five days,” said Ross Unger, a principal consultant for Business-First. “This project gave us a good example of how we could provide solutions for SAP customers using iBOLT. We have successfully offered it to five additional customers in just a few months for processes like EDI, website and third party application integration. "