Aerospace Manufacturer

Background: A major commercial and military aerospace manufacturer has been a global market leader for more than 40 years. With over $60 billion in total company revenues in 2006, the company dominates through technical excellence and innovation. Discovering new ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies is one way this global leader maintains its high standing.

With thousands of global suppliers, unique business systems and over 12 million procurement and financial transactions a year, the company determined that standardized integration with their global trading partners would save them millions of dollars. The company deployed an online trading hub, a strategic company-wide initiative to automate a wide range of financial and supply chain business procedures to reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Problem: In-House Middleware or Full Service Outsourcing

With its size and technical acumen, the aerospace company first looked to build support for their e-business integration “in-house.” But an 18-month investment in massive up-front hardware, software and dedicated IT teams resulted in integration with only two systems and a handful of trading partners. A labor-intensive and expensive picture was developing.

Largely grown through acquisitions, the company has both home-grown IT systems as well as those belonging to its adopted companies. Add in the problems of connecting the company’s worldwide trading partners: integrating all the unique trading relationships, 20 different procurement systems, 40 unique supply chains, as well as handling 8 billion transactions a year. And beyond initial deployment lie the resource and staff costs of managing ongoing integration activity and maintaining the integration hub. Further, the company needed to enable its legacy EDI systems to communicate in modern protocols.

The ideal business integration solution would enable the airline manufacturer to:

• Integrate over 25 independent internal business systems in over 50 worldwide sites
• Automate more than 40 distinct supply chain and financial processes
• Support millions of transactions annually with more than 8,000 trading partners
• Manage time-sensitive financial transactions with 100% reliability

Realizing the enormous complexity and costs of external integration, the company re-evaluated its internal solution and looked to outsourcing for a more efficient, cost-effective solution.

Solution: Streamline Information Exchange Through a Single Connection

Hubspan’s Integration Service fit the bill perfectly for the seamless information exchange that the manufacturer sought. A single connection to the Hubspan service links all the company’s trading partners, whatever their technological sophistication, IT systems or data models. The future opportunity to deploy faster, real-time connections using Hubspan’s Straight-Through IntegrationTM, also played a significant role in their decision.

As a result, the company’s many business systems can exchange information with global trading partners in a consistent, secure, scalable and reliable fashion. “Hubspan plays a critical role in supporting our company’s e-Business strategy by providing the underlying technology for this massive company-wide integration effort,” explains the online trading hub’s director. “Hubspan delivers an economically viable, secure, scalable and reliable way for our company to exchange business information with 100% of its business partners and will provide the path for all future integration initiatives.”

Results: Significant Savings in Time, Technology and TCO

With Hubspan, the company’s trading hub time to market was less than four months from launch. The initial deployment enabled the company to achieve real-time integration with a broad range of suppliers and all the functionality of a traditional EDI value-added network. The solution enables the company to exchange transactions with diverse trading partners around the world.

Hubspan’s service-based approach to business integration helped the company save millions of dollars through drastically lower infrastructure hardware, software and resource costs. Hubspan Straight-Through IntegrationTM also cuts costs through more efficient financial and supply chain processes.

Finally, outsourcing external integration to Hubspan offered the company a compelling total cost of ownership as a result of predictable pricing, single point connectivity, and leveraging legacy technology.

Hubspan provides the company with a solution it can trust: professional, integration and infrastructure services that serve the company’s many businesses and operations.

“Hubspan fundamentally transforms and optimizes the way we exchange information with our global community. It maximizes our efficiency, productivity and collaboration, generates cost savings, and enables us to focus on what we do best – aerospace and defense” – Director, Trading Hub