“We are very pleased with the work done by Ballard Chalmers. The resulting system was successful in fully automating this particular procurement process, and we would certainly recommend them to others.”
IT Director, Trustmarque Solutions
Trustmarque Solutions has over 20 years of experience in software licensing. They are experts in all aspects of software, software licensing and software asset management.
Situation
Trustmarque deals with a large volume of Microsoft licenses and this was resulting in many thousands of paper purchase orders and invoices being exchanged every month. Trustmarque was looking at ways to automate it. Microsoft had already implemented a global procurement system based on BizTalk Server and was already using this with a select few distributors and so a decision to proceed with BizTalk was made.
Solution
Trustmarque commissioned Ballard Chalmers to assist with the design and implementation of an automated eProcurement solution for Microsoft licenses based on BizTalk. This involved:
- Setting up adaptors and mappings to generate and consume messages based on the required xCBL and SAP schemas.
- Creating the infrastructure and certificates needed for an HTTPS transport based solution.
- Implementing an effective error handling strategy.
- Creating the orchestrations that manage the business processes and validations associated with the incoming and outgoing messages.
Outcome
The new solution substantially streamlined the process and reduced the man-hours required to support the volume of paperwork.