Many Pieces, One ViewMany Pieces, One View

The biggest benefits of information integration come from the ability to get operating data from multiple sources to support immediate decisions. Employees at Reliant Pharmaceuticals LLC are using EII tools from Juice Software Inc. to get a consolidated, real-time view of order-entry, customer-account, and inventory data stored in different tables in the databases that underlie the company's enterprise resource planning applications. Customer-service reps use the information to run credit checks and decide whether to approve orders.

The Juice software even pulls shipment information from distributors' intranets, which, when combined with order data, can tip off order-takers to distributors that may be buying excessive amounts of certain drugs on speculation that prices are about to rise. Before Reliant installed Juice last fall, that process was handled with paper, telephone calls, and many, many spreadsheets. "There was a lot of manual effort," says chief technology officer Ron Calderone. The EII technology "manages all the data brokering, and the information is up to date. It doesn't matter what the source is."

Information-integration software is different from data extraction, transformation, and loading tools, which are generally used to aggregate huge volumes of data into data warehouses in batch mode. That contrasts with the immediate access to operational data EII provides.

Enterprise information integration is also different from enterprise application integration, which links the applications and transactions related to a business process. For example, EAI can connect an invoicing system with a warehouse-shipping application, so a customer is automatically sent a bill as soon as his or her order leaves the loading dock.

But by providing a single, virtual model of multiple data sources, EII might help reduce the cost and complexity of large-scale EAI projects by 50% to 70%, says MetaMatrix CEO Philippe Chambadal, adding that EII can cut integration costs by as much as $100,000 per application per year. That could help drive the nascent market, which was about $500 million in 2002, Giga's Russom says.

USCO Logistics, part of Kuehne & Nagle International AG of Switzerland, is one of the software's early adopters. The transportation-planning and warehouse-management services company has been testing EII software from Nimble Technology Inc. to give clients an aggregated view of inventory and shipment information stored in about a dozen databases. "Every one is an operational data store," says Rod Franklin, solutions engineering VP at USCO.

The company considered building a centralized data warehouse but concluded that such a system couldn't deliver the up-to-date information customers need. USCO is considering using Nimble's software in conjunction with business-intelligence tools from Business Objects SA to give facilities managers operational-performance information.

The software also will make it easier to connect customers to USCO's IT systems to provide logistics information, a chore that until now has required manual programming. "This is a great productivity tool for our IT people," Franklin says.

Better information and better productivity? Sounds like a concept custom-made for these economic times.

Illustration by Istvan Orosz
Photo of Calderone by Anna Curtis

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