Assignment

Royal Wallace, a UK-based transportation company, is a global leader in the rail equipment and servicing industry. Its wide-range of products includes passenger rail vehicles and total transit systems. It also manufactures locomotives, freight cars, bogies, and provides rail-control solutions.

Because of the structure of its business, the Royal Wallace company has a presence in several countries across Europe and in North America, including the USA and Canada. And, each of these country-specific sites has its own dedicated legacy system such as SAP-based systems in UK and Germany, Oracle financials in Canada, and so on.

These legacy systems are acting as independent data silos with absolutely no kind of data-sharing happening between them. If the German SAP system wants to procure something from any of its vendors, it does so by using some kind of manual process at its end. The same scenario is replicated for all the other systems, too.

And, this is leading to a lot of data duplication taking place. For example, if two different systems are using the same vendor (say, Vendor A) for procuring white board markers, this vendor (Vendor A) information is getting stored at both the legacy systems. Also, this kind of scenario makes it impossible to leverage existing information across multiple systems.

The various systems at Royal Wallace company are based on different platforms. And, the applications running on these systems are used to exchange data in various different formats with the outside world. Most of these were proprietary formats that each of these applications had created as per their own requirements over the years; there was no single standard approach that had been followed. And above all, as most of these formats were in existence over the past several years, the system owners were very reluctant to replace them for a common standard format/template.

Royal Wallace understands that, to survive the competition in today's fast paced economy and to reduce its time-to-market, it needs to put an integration solution (EAI) in place as soon as possible. The integration model should integrate all the existing legacy systems irrespective of the platforms and operating systems that these systems are based upon.

The model should take care of the various data formats that would pass through this integration scenario and apply the necessary transformation, translation, and data validation rules upon them. And last, but definitely not the least, this integration solution should be scalable enough such that any new system could be easily plugged into this solution in the future with minimal changes.

The integration model should provide:

Integration between the various legacy systems

Automated process for procurement of goods

Data transformation to one common data format and translation logic according to the prescribed rules

Data transformation

Persistent storage mechanism for the data

Validation of business data to a certain extent

Connectivity to various drop zones and databases

a: What industry is Royal Wallace involved in?

b: How widespread is the Royal Wallace organization? Why is this a challenge?

c: What benefits will the new system provide?

d: What challenges must the new system overcome to get the benefits?