Midsize Manufacturer Improves Supply Chain Transparency ...



Overview

Country: Germany

Industry: Manufacturing

Customer Profile

Offenbach, Germany–based Prowell GmbH is a privately owned manufacturer of corrugated cardboard and recycled paper. The company has 550 employees and roughly 300 million euros in annual revenue.

Business Situation

Prowell needed a portal and integration solution that could connect all of the companies and systems in its supply chain.

Solution

ebox, Prowell’s new solution, is a comprehensive portal and integration platform and the basis for a service-oriented IT infrastructure. The solution connects the company’s internal systems with those of its customers and suppliers, automates the business processes between those parties, and provides deep visibility into those processes.

Benefits

■ Single solution for extended supply chain

■ Scalable to thousands of business partners

■ Improves worker productivity and reduces process costs

■ Helps Prowell and its customers to sell more

| | |“We chose BizTalk Server for several reasons, including its ability to let us graphically model and drive our business processes. Also, it was ideal for the hub-and-spoke integration model that we had to support.”

Philipp Kosloh, Director of Supply Chain Management, Prowell GmbH

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| | | |To drive revenue growth, paper product manufacturer Prowell GmbH built a full-featured e-business |

| | | |portal and integration platform that connects with the company’s internal systems and the systems of |

| | | |trading partners to automate supply chain processes. Prowell’s new solution—called ebox—is based on |

| | | |Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 and uses a flexible hub-and-spoke integration model to provide the |

| | | |company and its trading partners with robust e-business capabilities and extended visibility into the|

| | | |supply chain. Those capabilities will help Prowell and its thousands of customers, suppliers, and |

| | | |other business partners to reduce process costs and sell more of their products and services. |

| | | |Building ebox using Microsoft technologies helped Prowell to deliver its new enterprise-ready |

| | | |solution in only six months—and at one-tenth of the cost of another well-known portal and integration|

| | | |platform. |

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Situation

Founded in March 1992 and based in Offenbach, Germany, Prowell GmbH specializes in the high-tech production of corrugated base cardboard and corrugated cardboard formats. The company’s four primary manufacturing plants—located in eastern Germany, western Germany, France, and the Czech Republic—produce an annual volume of 350,000 tons of corrugated cardboard, making Prowell the European market leader in this market segment. The company is considered to be one of Germany’s most innovative start-up enterprises, having been presented with the Rhineland-Palatinate Innovation Award.

In addition to its cardboard manufacturing business, Prowell has three wholly owned subsidiaries:

■ Propapier. A few years ago, Prowell invested 130 million euros to build its own cutting-edge paper production plant. At the heart of the paper mill is an ultramodern paper manufacturing machine from Finnish company Metso Paper, which can manufacture as many as 1,300 linear meters of paper per minute. Propapier buys recycled fibers from several suppliers and produces recycled paper, which is shipped to the company’s four cardboard production plants and sold into the free market. Prowell also uses paper made from fresh fibers.

■ Prologistik. Prologistik occupies a key position in Prowell’s supply chain; it is responsible for all distribution within the Prowell group, as well as for logistics between Prowell and its suppliers and customers. The company maintains a fleet of 70 trucks that are equipped with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to optimize deployment of the transport fleet and allow customers to track delivery status.

■ Proservice. Proservice provides marketing services for many of Prowell customers, as well as some other companies. Approximately 95 percent of all companies in Germany—and most of Prowell’s customers—are small or medium-sized businesses with fewer than 500 employees and limited marketing resources.

Complicated Supply Chain

Prowell has a complicated supply chain—one into which the company must have deep visibility in order to control costs. Prowell builds all corrugated cardboard to order, allowing customers to specify a range of product characteristics that include paper quality, scoring, thickness, width, and more. Most of the time, manufacturing is done the day after orders are received and those orders are shipped the following day. As one of the largest providers of corrugated cardboard in Europe, Prowell processes some 3,000 orders per day.

Prowell’s supply chain is further complicated by extensive logistics. Propapier receives some 50 truckloads of fiber per day—purchased from five suppliers—and ships another 50 loads of paper to Prowell’s four cardboard manufacturing plants, as well as several external customers. Each manufacturing plant receives from 15 to 20 truckloads of paper per day—supplied by Propapier and nine other suppliers—and ships from 280 to 350 truckloads per day of finished product to customers. To move all of those materials, Prowell relies on Prologistik and some 40 third-party freight forwarders.

Need for Improved E-Business Capability

In 2002, Prowell began looking at how it could drive revenue growth by helping its customers sell more. The company determined that the best way to do this was to provide customers with comprehensive e-business capabilities that, like the marketing services offered by Proservice, many of the company’s small and medium-sized customers could not afford to develop in-house. In turn, those new e-business capabilities would help Prowell’s customers to better compete and win more business, resulting in more sales for Prowell.

To help its customers sell more, Prowell needed a centrally hosted solution that could facilitate seamless electronic transactions between the company and its 500 customers, as well as between those customers and the thousands of companies they serve. Prowell already could receive orders from some 60 percent of its own customers using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and a proprietary flat-file format—a capability that, for many customers, was possible only because Prowell supplied them with a custom desktop EDI client.

Prowell examined several prebuilt e-commerce portal solutions but soon realized that they were not designed to support a hub-and-spoke integration model, nor could they flexibly connect with the broad range of systems used by Prowell customers and the businesses that those customers serve. Prowell then began looking for an integration solution.

At the same time, the company saw that many of the sell-side capabilities that it wanted to provide also could be used to optimize the buy side of its supply chain, which meant that the new solution would need to integrate with all of Prowell’s internal systems: SAP for finance and human resources, which runs on the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server operating system; WEPAFORM, a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is based on Linux and uses a flat-file data store; and Hypersped, a custom UNIX-based truck dispatch solution used by Prologistik.

“Connecting to all of the systems in our supply chain required integrating with 30 to 40 different types of systems: mainstream ERP solutions like SAP, several smaller-name ERP systems, quite a few custom-built systems, and even some desktop programs like Microsoft Excel and Access,” says Philipp Kosloh, Director of Supply Chain Management for Prowell. “In addition, we knew that we needed to make our new solution accessible over the Web—to service smaller companies.”

Adds Jürgen Heindl, Chef Executive Officer of Prowell, “What we needed was an extremely flexible integration solution together with a full-featured Web portal.”

Solution

Prowell decided to build a custom solution using the Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software. The company’s new solution, called ebox, combines a full-featured e-business portal with comprehensive integration capabilities. On that foundation, Prowell is building a range of new business capabilities—from providing direct customers with e-business capabilities to increasing visibility and efficiency throughout the company’s supply chain.

At the heart of ebox is Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004, which facilitates integration between the e-box.de Web portal, Prowell’s legacy systems, the systems of Prowell’s suppliers and carriers, and the systems of Prowell’s direct customers and packaging users. In addition, BizTalk Server automates many of Prowell’s business processes and provides the company and its trading partners with greater visibility into Prowell’s extended supply chain. Combined with other components of Windows Server System, those capabilities give Prowell a powerful solution that helps the company to better monitor, manage, and optimize its supply chain.

“We chose BizTalk Server for several reasons, including its ability to let us graphically model and drive our business processes,” says Kosloh. “Also, it was ideal for the hub-and-spoke integration model that we had to support. Most other solutions were built for point-to-point integration, which would not have been efficient considering the number of companies and range of systems that we had to connect with. And because BizTalk Server is a part of Windows Server System, we knew it would work well with the other server infrastructure software that we would need to use—the operating system, database, Web servers, and so on.”

To develop ebox, Prowell enlisted the aid of the Business Communication Competency Center at the University of Karlsruhe, an organization that works closely with Microsoft and the business community to help companies create connected supply chains and networks of trading partners by defining methods and tools, and implementing pilot solutions and proofs of concept. Working together, the combined team spent the first six months of the project understanding Prowell’s business needs throughout the supply chain. Solution development began in August 2003, with a team of four developers from the university and Kosloh as the expert on Prowell business processes.

“We had to pull together a broad range of resources—some with business expertise and others with technical expertise,” says Marc Weilguni, IT Manager at Prowell. “BizTalk Server made it easy for those resources to work together efficiently.”

Adds Kosloh, “The ebox solution helps us to build up a service-oriented IT infrastructure that fulfills the needs of a growing and flexible business. This infrastructure helps to cope with business needs in various areas of supply chain management—from sell-side solutions to process optimization.”

New Business Capabilities

Figure 1 illustrates the central role that ebox plays in Prowell’s supply chain. The company already has moved some 50 of its existing EDI customers onto the solution—a process that took just two weeks. Customers whose internal systems have EDI capabilities send orders to Prowell as they did in the past, whereas customers who used the Prowell-supplied EDI client now use the e-box.de Web portal. Either way, those customers enjoy all of the same capabilities that they had in the past, including the ability to submit and edit orders, view current and past orders, determine when the quality of cardboard they need will next be produced, and more.

In addition to duplicating Prowell’s preexisting EDI capabilities, ebox extends the visibility that the company and its customers have into Prowell’s internal processes by tying in other Prowell internal systems. Integration with Hypersped and WEPAFORM lets customers track orders, view estimated delivery times, identify the freight forwarder and specific truck for a given order, and determine the location of that truck—a feature currently limited to Prologistik trucks, although Prowell plans to use Europe’s Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network to extend the capability to all freight forwarders that it uses. In the near future, Prowell will integrate with the Microsoft MapPoint® Web service to also provide users with a map of the truck’s current location.

ebox also automates previously manual business processes such as pallet management and complaint management, both of which rely on BizTalk Server and its support for long-running transactions to automate those processes and integrate with the legacy systems that support them.

For example, the pallet management service requires integration with Hypersped, the company’s UNIX-based dispatch system. The complaint processing service relies on the application integration capabilities of BizTalk Server to coordinate the activity of all four legacy systems: Hypersped for logistics, WEPAFORM for manufacturing, SAP for the necessary financial adjustments, and Easy Archive—a document management system that runs on Windows 2000 Server and is used to document the complaint and store digital pictures of damaged items.

“Customers can access all of the information and services that ebox provides through the Web-based portal, XML, or Web services—and much of it through EDI,” says Kosloh. “Not only are we providing our trading partners with deep visibility into the supply chain, but we are delivering a high level of flexibility in how they access that information. With BizTalk Server, we can integrate with any system once and make the information and transactional capabilities provided by that system accessible to the members of our extended supply chain in seemingly endless ways. Even more powerful, we can orchestrate and automate the activity of those systems to improve the efficiency of our own business processes, as well as those of our customers and supply chain partners.”

Ability to Serve an Extended Supply Chain

In addition to helping Prowell deliver new services to its direct customers, ebox helps the company to easily extend those services to the businesses that its customers serve. Like the company’s direct customers, those companies that buy packaging made from Prowell cardboard can place and edit orders, check order status, view projected delivery dates, and more. And like the interactions between Prowell and its customers, all of those transactions flow through and are orchestrated by BizTalk Server, which uses business rules that are configurable on a partner-by-partner basis to process each transaction according to the unique business processes and integration capabilities of the parties involved. As with Prowell’s direct customers, businesses that those companies serve can access the services provided by ebox through its Web portal or programmatically using XML, EDI, or Web services.

On the portal, each company is presented with the modules and functions that are applicable to that party’s role in the supply chain. “Single sign on” capabilities provided by BizTalk Server simplify management of partner credentials and save users from having to manage more than one username and password.

For many of the capabilities provided by ebox, Prowell was able to take the same services that it had built to service direct customers and reuse them to service the companies that those customers serve. “A great feature of BizTalk Server is that it lets us define business processes separately from the unique business rules that govern those processes for each party,” says Kosloh. “With that kind of flexibility, we’re able to define a process once and reuse it throughout the supply chain. For example, we employ just-in-time manufacturing whereas most of our customers ship from inventory. BizTalk Server lets us define the order management process once and tailor it to the unique way that each of our customers services an order.”

How It Works

Figure 2 shows how BizTalk Server works in support of Prowell’s business processes. Messages are received over the Internet or are passed to BizTalk Server from the e-box.de portal, where they enter a pipeline that converts the message to a standardized XML format. That XML document then is put into the BizTalk Server Message Box, which uses a publish-and-subscribe messaging infrastructure to deliver high performance and scalability.

Business processes—such as receiving orders or processing invoices—are driven by BizTalk Server orchestrations, which hold subscriptions to particular types of messages in the Message Box. When a matching subscription is filled, the Message Box notifies the orchestration to initiate or continue processing. The orchestration retrieves the message and processes it according to workflows, schemas, and mappings that are created using the Orchestration Designer, BizTalk Editor, and BizTalk Mapper.

Within an orchestration, configurable business rules determine which suborchestrations to load and execute. For example, within the top-level orchestration for managing customer complaints, there are three subprocesses: documenting a complaint, addressing the quality issue, and making any financial adjustments. Within the quality-issue step, the BizTalk Server rules engine and any partner-specific requirements captured using BizTalk Server Business Activity Services determine how that step is to be performed for each customer: using Six Sigma, ISO 9000, and so on. Control eventually passes back to the top-level orchestration, which then continues on with the next top-level part of the business process.

The BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine is accessed using a graphical user interface—the Business Rules Composer—that helps developers, business analysts, and system administrators to develop and apply business rules and policies efficiently.

Prowell also is using the Business Rules Engine to determine how customer orders are processed. For the company’s top 20 customers, ebox recognizes those customers and will try to fulfill orders within 24 hours. If this cannot be done, an e-mail message is sent to the particular customer’s account manager. For tier-two customers, a message is sent to Prowell’s inside sales team. Tier-three customers—those that place only the occasional order—are provided with an automated reply that tells them when an order can be fulfilled and how long it will take.

Many Prowell business processes require sending a message back to the customer, such as an order acknowledgement. In this case, one of the tasks performed by the orchestration is to send a message back to the Message Box. The new message, which includes information on where and how that message is to be delivered, is picked up by a pipeline that converts the message from the solution’s internal XML format to its required external format and sends that message on to its ultimate destination.

“When combined, the support for layered orchestrations in BizTalk Server and its ability to define message transformations and business rules separately from those orchestrations give us a great deal of flexibility,” says Karl-Heinz Sternemann, General Manager of the Business Communication Competency Center. “Furthermore, the rules engine in BizTalk Server lets nontechnical users change business rules on the fly. For example, an account manager can change a customer’s credit limit at any time—without any help from the IT staff—and that change is dynamically applied to the appropriate orchestrations.”

Comprehensive Business Process Monitoring and Management

In addition to its integration and business process automation capabilities, BizTalk Server gives Prowell the tools to efficiently manage and monitor its extended supply chain. Some of the capabilities that the company is finding especially valuable include:

■ Visibility into business processes. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) in BizTalk Server 2004 gives Prowell more visibility into its supply chain. The company’s business analysts can describe which business process indicators they want to track, and ebox provides them with direct visibility into those processes. Prowell already is using BAM to monitor the number of incoming orders, how much of each quality of cardboard is ordered, and the number of orders per customer. The company has plans to expand the metrics that are monitored to include elapsed time from order to fulfillment, elapsed time from order to payment, and many other indicators that will help Prowell to measure—and thus improve—the efficiency of its business operations. “By applying BAM to the online transactions between our direct customers and the companies that they serve, we can gauge demand and forecast production more accurately,” notes Kosloh.

■ Efficient partner management. BizTalk Explorer provides Prowell with a powerful tool to streamline partner management—a key need considering that ebox eventually will service all 500 of the company’s direct customers and potentially thousands of other companies. With BizTalk Explorer, pipeline and orchestration configurations are created once and can be flexibly combined with business rules and applied to groups of partners. Similarly, implementation details such as the specific send and receive ports to be used can be configured separately. Not only does this facilitate greater reuse of orchestrations, but it also provides increased flexibility in managing dynamic partner relationships.

Solution Development and Architecture

ebox was developed using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system, which extended tools like the BizTalk Server Orchestration Designer, Pipeline Designer, Editor, and Mapper to the solution’s developers through an environment with which they were familiar. All code was written using the C# programming language, except for a few portal components that were written using the Microsoft Visual Basic® development system.

The BizTalk Server tools play these roles:

■ Orchestration Designer simplifies the process of creating orchestrations—models of business processes that are compiled into executable code.

■ BizTalk Editor helps developers to define schemas, which are used to describe the format of data that is processed inside organizations and between trading partners.

■ BizTalk Mapper presents source schemas and destination schemas side by side, enabling developers to define transformations between the data elements within messages.

■ Pipeline Designer is used to prepare incoming and outgoing messages for further processing by implementing such operations as encryption and decryption, compression, reformatting, and validation.

ebox runs on the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, which is the foundation of Windows Server System, and takes advantage of several built-in features: Internet Information Services version 6.0, Windows SharePointTM Services, Active Directory® service, and the Microsoft .NET Framework, which provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.

The centrally hosted solution relies on BizTalk Server 2004 Enterprise Edition. Prowell plans to encourage many of its business partners to use BizTalk Server 2004 Partner Edition, which, when used in combination with a BizTalk SEED package, will help Prowell to bring new partners online in just a few days. (A SEED package is an XML package containing a company’s business document configuration.) The database tier for ebox runs on Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 Enterprise Edition.

ebox integrates with Prowell’s existing systems in a variety of ways, according to the limitations and capabilities of each unique system. Integration with WEPAFORM was achieved by building a Web service “wrapper” around the Linux-based system, which is called using the built-in support for Web services provided by BizTalk Server. Integration with SAP is done with the SAP .NET Connector, which lets developers easily access SAP Business Objects. (Prowell plans to switch to the BizTalk Server 2004 SAP Adapter when it becomes available.) ebox connects with Hypersped using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and integrates with Easy Archive, Prowell’s Windows-based document management system, using a Web service interface.

Next Steps

Today, some 10 percent of Prowell’s customers are serviced with ebox, as are a select few of the packaging users. The system currently is processing from 4,000 to 5,000 orders per month—an order volume that will increase tenfold or more as Prowell adds more of its trading partners to the system. Prowell plans to begin rolling out ebox to remaining customers in March 2004, at which point the solution will process upward of 40,000 orders per month—a number that will continue to grow as more businesses that are served by Prowell’s direct customers start to use the system.

In parallel, Prowell will continue to expand the role that ebox plays in its extended supply chain. “We now have a flexible and powerful integration platform and portal—a solution upon which we can easily layer new services,” says Kosloh. “Now that we’ve realized the functionality needed to integrate with our direct customers and the customers they serve, we’re looking at ways to deliver additional value and optimize our extended supply chain. New services that we’re considering include vendor-managed inventory and volume procurement of other supplies that are used by our customers.”

Benefits

Using BizTalk Server 2004 and other Windows Server System products, Prowell built a solution that can connect all parties in its extended supply chain and automate the business transactions between those parties. ebox also provides deep visibility into those processes, which is helping the company uncover synergies throughout its supply chain and drive further efficiency gains. And by extending many of those same capabilities to its trading partners, Prowell is strengthening its relationships with those partners and increasing the growth of its business.

“Building up a supply chain network is necessary in today’s business climate,” says Kosloh. “In addition to the revenue growth and cost savings that ebox will facilitate, the new capabilities that we’re delivering to our business partners will help to differentiate Prowell from its competition and make our customer relationships more stable. With ebox, we’re able to offer our customers far more than cardboard—what many people consider to be a commodity product.”

To Kosloh, the ease of integration provided by BizTalk Server is a critical factor in building a connected supply chain network. “It’s hard enough to get our customers to change their way of thinking and open up their internal systems to us,” he says. “BizTalk Server makes that task easier by eliminating the need to impose extensive and costly integration requirements.”

One Solution for Partners of All Sizes

With ebox, Prowell is able to service business partners of all sizes—and at all points in the supply chain—with a single solution. Smaller companies can use the e-box.de portal or integrate with ebox through their desktop applications. For the portal, Prowell used the inbox/outbox capabilities provided by BizTalk Server and its ability to integrate with Windows SharePoint Services and the Microsoft Office InfoPathTM 2003 information gathering program to capture user-entered data and deliver it to BizTalk Server using the same XML format that ebox uses internally—as well as to deliver responses back to the user.

For midsized companies, Prowell plans to use BizTalk Server Partner Edition to facilitate rapid yet flexible integration. For large customers, BizTalk Server can connect with their existing systems regardless of the integration standards that are employed.

“In the past, our customers either had to rely on the EDI client that we provided or have their own EDI systems and adopt our proprietary file format—together accounting for a little more than half of our order volume,” says Kosloh. “With ebox, we can extend that online ordering capability to our entire customer base and support those orders in an automated manner. And its Web-based interface will extend the capabilities provided by the solution to all users within those companies. In the past, those EDI capabilities provided by the desktop client were limited to a few customer desktops and required the dispatch of a Prowell technician to install and configure the software.”

Improved Employee Productivity

As rollout of ebox continues, Prowell will expand its use to service those customers that used to submit orders manually. By automating the process for those remaining customers, ebox will eliminate a great deal of paperwork, faxes, phone calls, and order entry. “Our ebox solution should reduce our remaining manual order processing workload by at least 75 percent, which will leave our inside sales team with a good deal more time to focus on winning new business,” says Corinne Brinster, Manager of Customer Service at Prowell.

Choosing to build its new solution using Microsoft technologies also provided productivity gains during solution development. The integrated development environment provided by Visual Studio .NET and the extensive prebuilt functionality in BizTalk Server and other Windows Server System products helped Prowell to build its new solution in only six months—roughly half the time that it took to define solution requirements.

“Seamless integration between all solution components and the development environment was a strong benefit, as was the fact that BizTalk Server uses XML as its internal standard,” says Sternemann. “Also, the ability to define a business process using Microsoft Visio® drawing and diagramming software and then import that model into the development environment saved a good deal of time.”

New Revenue Opportunities

Prowell’s new solution will help the company to drive new revenues in several ways, one of which is by helping customers to sell more—in turn leading to more orders for Prowell cardboard. “Our customers aren’t IT specialists, but with ebox they can realize many of the same advantages that traditionally have been limited to larger companies with dedicated development resources—like the ability to connect with a business-to-business marketplace and reach new customers,” says Kosloh.

In addition, the extensive e-commerce capabilities and supply chain transparency provided by ebox will make Prowell more attractive to do business with, thus improving the company’s ability to sign up new customers. “We have very good internal processes, and ebox lets us leverage that as a competitive advantage by exposing those processes to our customers and partners,” says Kosloh. “We may be the market leader in our space, but with 30 percent market share there’s a huge opportunity for continued growth.”

Kosloh also notes that ebox will help Prowell and its customers to approach and sell to larger companies, which traditionally have been served by large vertically integrated suppliers that produce their own cardboard as well as the packaging made from it.

“Our new solution lets us focus on manufacturing while our customers focus on sales, yet still function together as a single company,” says Kosloh. “With a connected distribution chain, we can develop a continent-wide virtual presence—one that opens doors to larger companies that want a single supplier across all of Europe. The opportunity may be serviced by many of our customers in different geographies, but the packaging user still will be able to do business with a single virtual enterprise.”

Reduced Process Costs

Through the high level of transparency that ebox provides into Prowell’s business processes, the solution is helping the company to uncover new synergies that, as Prowell capitalizes on them, will continue to drive down process costs. “The increased level of visibility provides several advantages, one of which is that we’re finding new opportunities for cost reduction throughout our supply chain,” says Kosloh. “Furthermore, we now have the ability to rapidly and cost-effectively capitalize on those opportunities.

“For example, in our recycle business alone, the procuring and receiving of raw materials generates some 350 pieces of paperwork per day—with no visibility into any part of the process. By applying the integration and business process automation capabilities provided by ebox to that opportunity, I estimate that we can realize a 70 percent labor savings. We already have the infrastructure in place, so the point at which each new capability that we develop pays for itself will be less than a year.”

Ready for New Business Opportunities

As Prowell continues to increase the reach and usage of ebox, the company will need to grow its solution to handle greater transaction volumes and ensure that its new solution remains up and running at all times. BizTalk Server includes several features that will help the company to meet those requirements, one of which is by allowing the functionality that it provides to be distributed across several servers. Pipelines, orchestrations, and the Message Box each can run on separate virtual hosts, with each host consisting of one or more servers that can be managed as a single virtual resource and can be clustered to maximize service availability.

“Solutions built using BizTalk Server 2004 can scale out without complication—and without added management effort,” says Sternemann. “And the performance of BizTalk Server 2004 is an order of magnitude or more better than BizTalk Server 2002—a gain that is due to its new publish-and-subscribe Message Box architecture and the fact that all orchestrations are now compiled and run on the Microsoft .NET Framework common language runtime.”

Lower Solution Costs

By building ebox using Microsoft technologies, Prowell was able to realize its new capabilities with far lower costs than had the company selected any other platform. Kosloh attributes that savings to lower development costs, lower infrastructure costs, and lower management costs.

“Building ebox using BizTalk Server and other parts of Windows Server System gave us the capabilities we needed at one-tenth the cost of an IBM solution, which also would have required the use of their services and consultants. With Microsoft technologies, we were able to enlist the aid of a trusted partner and deploy a solution that will fundamentally change our business for a fraction of that price.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and system management. For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

‌windowsserversystem

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“Our ebox solution should reduce our remaining manual order processing workload by at least 75 percent, which will leave our inside sales team with a good deal more time to focus on winning new business.”

Corinne Brinster, Manager of Customer Service, Prowell GmbH

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“A great feature of BizTalk Server is that it lets us define business processes separately from the unique business rules that govern those processes for each party.”

Philipp Kosloh, Director of Supply Chain Management, Prowell GmbH

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition

− BizTalk Server 2004

− SQL Server 2000

■ Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 |Hardware

■ Final configuration to be determined | |

“The ebox solution helps us to build up a service-oriented IT infrastructure that fulfills the needs of a growing and flexible business.”

Philipp Kosloh, Director of Supply Chain Management, Prowell GmbH

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Figure 2: BizTalk Server provides Prowell with a flexible, scalable solution for application integration and the automation of business processes.

“We had to pull together a broad range of resources—some with business expertise and others with technical expertise. BizTalk Server made it easy for those resources to work together efficiently.”

Marc Weilguni, IT Manager, Prowell GmbH

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© 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Active Directory, BizTalk, InfoPath, MapPoint, SharePoint, Visio, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published March 2004 | | |

For More Information

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For more information about the Business Communication Competency Center at the University of Karlsruhe, visit the website at:

talk-

For more information about Prowell products and services, visit the website at:

prowell.de

Figure 1: ebox, which is based on BizTalk Server 2004 and other Windows Server System products, helps Prowell to manage, monitor, and automate business processes throughout its extended supply chain.

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“What we needed was an extremely flexible integration solution together with a full-featured Web portal.”

Jürgen Heindl, Chief Executive Officer,

Prowell GmbH

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