JD Edwards Integration Case Study: Vita Group
Ndevr Integration Suite enables Vita Group to do Business its own way
The Customer
- Australia’s most exciting lifestyle electronics and telecommunications retailer.
- Floated in 2006 as Fone Zone and then changed the company name to Vita Group in April 2008 to more precisely express the expanding portfolio of Group brands.
- The Vita Group brands incorporate Fone Zone, Next Byte and One Zero – as well as selected Telstra shops in QLD and VIC Australia.
- Industry: Retail, Telecommunications
- Annual Revenue: $300M
- Employees: 1200
- Grown from 1 to 215+ stores in 13 years
Technologies and Services
- Oracle JD Edwards
- Ndevr – Integration Suite
- Ndevr – Professional Services
Competing in the fast paced technology retail zone and aiming towards an ambitious five year growth plan, Vita Group’s flag ship brand Fone Zone, needed to upgrade its business systems to keep up with its projected targets.
With legacy back-office systems hindering their growth progress, Fone Zone needed a solution that would ultimately streamline its business processes to improve efficiency and speed to market.
Lex Moses, CIO of Vita Group said, “Our back-office systems at that stage were really primitive and many of our essential business processes were still done manually which was greatly inhibiting our efficiency and potential growth. Our front of house retail system however, was great and really worked for us, so we needed a solution that could easily phase-out the legacy system but keep the retail system as it was. We also needed a system that was highly-scalable to match our five year growth targets and beyond.”
The front of house system, Advanced Retail POS, was retained for the retail side of the business as it was integral to Fone Zone’s requirements, both current and future and it was simple for the store staff to learn and use.
After evaluating the products on the market, Fone Zone decided to implement JD Edwards (JDE) as the replacement for the old manual back office systems.
“JD Edwards not only had the reputation as the best of breed ERP system for Finance and Supply Chain, but of all the ERP software on the market, JD Edwards showed the largest degree of compatibility for integration with the Fone Zone business.”
“JD Edwards was a great fit for around 80% of our business needs. We agreed that it would require the least amount of modification in order to provide us with an ERP solution that would be operational in time to help us achieve our targets in this critical stage of the company’s growth”, said CIO Lex Moses.
There was a problem: the remaining 20% of the business was more difficult to integrate into JD Edwards. Fone Zone found itself stuck with an ultimatum; either the JD Edwards consultants had to make significant modifications to the system – or make significant modifications to the way Fone Zone did business.
The JD Edwards Integration Solution
Faced with two equally disruptive choices, Fone Zone investigated its options further and discovered Ndevr Integration Suite, a solution that would allow seamless integration of the final 20% of their business processes into JD Edwards.
Ndevr Integration Suite was placed between JD Edwards and the Advanced Retail POS product which created an abstract layer allowing the retail system to easily integrate and communicate with JD Edwards. In particular, Ndevr Integration Suite allowed the retail system to easily perform its processes or gather information from JDE without the need to understand JDE system peculiarities like date structures, numerical mathematics and business unit formats.
“Using Ndevr Integration Suite as the integration portal into JD Edwards enabled Fone Zone to stick with the programs that worked for us, while still using all the best functions of the JDE software and without undertaking any modifications. This kept our initial implementation costs lower and continued to show ROI long after the initial integration as upgrades were so easy to apply.”
The other significant benefit achieved using Ndevr Integration Suite is that Fone Zone was able to create additional applications using the latest toolsets, comfortable in the knowledge that any application would integrate seamlessly with its new back office JD Edwards system.
Without the Integration Suite, we would have had to implement a whole new front office system – completely changing the way we do business and greatly hindering our growth plans in the process. The success of the JD Edwards system in our business is a direct result of Ndevr’s skills”, says Lex.
“Ndevr really took the time to get to know our business and get to the root of our issues. Without the Integration Suite, we would have had to implement a whole new front office system – completely changing the way we do business and greatly hindering our growth plans in the process. The success of the JD Edwards system in our business is a direct result of Ndevr’s skills”, says Moses.
Ndevr Integration Suite Improves Business Performance
“Vita Group now has a fully functioning system that utilises the best parts of JD Edwards and it functions because it has been combined with Ndevr Integration Services. The result is that we now have best of breed software that fits our business, instead of a business modified to fit the best of breed software.” Lex Moses, CIO, Fone Zone Group Ltd
As Vita Group continues to move toward a process centric approach to ensure maximum performance, Ndevr Integration Suite remains an integral piece of IT infrastructure, as it enables new programs to easily integrate with its’ JDE back-office system. This is particularly important as the company continues to grow through acquisitions, diversifications and increased product demand; Vita Group is confident that its systems are capable of continuing to deliver efficiency and scalability.
