Case study: Firwood Paints win with SOA

It understands the importance of integrating technology, smart business processes and sharing information to create a truly flexible business model that can respond quickly to market changes and maximise new opportunities.

CSI understand that the priority for any business is simple – maintain growth and increase revenue and profits whilst containing costs. To do this, the organisation needs to be flexible in its business processes and to have an IT infrastructure that allows it to retain and reuse existing assets. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach helps organisations do just that.

CSI have been working with Firwood Paints Limited on a recent SOA implementation focusing on better use of their e-business route.

Firwood Paints, a manufacturer of coatings for industrial applications, had seen a significant decline in the market in terms of value and volume, with traditional manufacturing moving out of the UK. In addition, the market had become increasingly competitive as revenue and margins decreased and Firwood faced the challenge of delivering quality customer service with a limited external and internal sales channel.

Through in-depth consultation, four principle areas of expansion were identified. Martin Wallen recalls that “the one that most interested us was the use of the web for sales and marketing purposes. We engaged in a series of business definition workshops to help us identify objectives and areas for success.”

Firwood was clear about its business requirements and sought to implement a strategic business-to-business trading platform that had transactional and integration features. In addition, the solution had to be flexible, reliable, scalable and manageable.

By implementing IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Express, Firwood Paints has seen increased revenues and profits allowing utilisation of a new sales channel through a fully integrated online e-commerce site.

Martin Wallen, Managing Director of Firwood Paints commented: “Although we understood the capabilities of the internet, we needed to ensure that the products we chose would fully exploit today’s technology and give us full e-commerce functionality. Our new web presence needed to offer us an end-to-end solution that would integrate and streamline our business processes.”

The continuing business benefits for Firwood are considerable. Not only can they see a real ROI through increased order capability and more efficient business processes, but they can provide better audit trails, intelligence and analysis tools with reporting functionality. However, the real benefits of the solution is their ability to leverage current market trends and react speedily to business changes and competitors whilst at the same time, planning for future growth within this new and wider target audience.

In addition, Firwood has seen significant cost savings by removing the need to invest in a new computing suite when taking the e-business route; achieving this by integrating its legacy IBM eServer iSeries machines.

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Formed in 1983, CSI is one of the UK’s leading business system integrators. With over 100 staff supporting a wide range of customers across a number of sectors, the company’s experience and expertise can help businesses reach their IT goals.