System & Data Integration

A unified view of data for Emmelibri

The Client

Emmelibri is the company that coordinates distribution and commercial activities within a major publishing group, Messaggerie Italiane. Through its subsidiaries or investee companies, the group is active in book distribution, traditional and online bookstores, large-scale retail and books on offer. Part of the logistics functions and all staff functions of theoperating subsidiaries have been centralized in Emmelibri. This is a company more than 100 years old, with a very long history, the first Italian company to be equipped with an IBM mainframe, a reality that has always believed in innovation at the service of business. One of the most challenging projects involves the concentration at La Città del Libro - located in Stradella - of the logistics activities carried out for Messaggerie Libri and, with a two-year investment program, has transformed the facility into one of the most modern automated sites in Europe, covering an area of more than 80,000 square meters.

As of today, it represents the largest platform for books in Italy, coordinating distribution and commercial activities in the book business through an ecosystem of services that enables improved performance offered to Publishers and Booksellers, innovating work processes and containing costs.

The challenge

Migrating a system that is in production and connected to numerous business partners requires delicacy. Emmelibri's business specifically required minimizing the impact on operations and not having to involve business partners in the migration phases.

To achieve this, we worked closely with the client to define a transparent migration path in which interfaces with business partners remained unchanged and the legacy platform was progressively replaced (and then decommissioned) one stream at a time, with no downtime.

The project

Emmelibri has embarked on a process of modernization of its integration systems (ESB/ETL) and as part of this consolidation and modernization process has chosen Mind-Mercatis to provide architectural consulting and assessment on the Boomi platform, this is because of Mind-Mercatis' established historical experience on Boomi.

We worked alongside the client on a cadenced migration schedule, industrializing the migration of processes. We reverse-engineered and modernized processes, taking advantage of the potential of the new bus. In addition, since it was a priority in this context to give autonomy to the client, we carried out training for Emmelibri's specialists, becoming autonomous on the system and control of the operation.

Unify and modernize data exchange processes between cloud and on prem systems

The client already had Pentaho as a platform to manage about a hundred flows, mainly accounting in nature, and was already taking advantage of the potential of the Boomi platform. At the end of 2021, Mind-Mercatis was chosen to migrate to Boomi Pentaho flows, resulting in the divestment of the same. The key aspects were to improve data quality (speed of updating etc...), going to unify and amalgamate the data of the systems between cloud and on-premise and to modernize and unify all integration, synchronization and data exchange processes and bringing them within a unified and modern ESB Cloud. In this context, the project included the following objectives:

Hooking modern SaaS cloud platforms to the IT system

Always up-to-date data across systems

Modernization of interfaces between systems

Simplicity and speed of adaptation to evolving technologies

The strategy

Mind-Mercatis provided training on the Boomi platform, and then continued with hands-on training (training on the job), during all phases of development.

After the analysis phase done four-handedly with the client, the processes were developed and tested by Mind-Mercatis specialists, and then underwent the testing phase by the client before going live.

The migration was accomplished successfully and on time despite not having Mind-Mercatis access to the original system (Pentaho), this was due to the collaboration mode proposed to the client.

The migration of flows from Pentaho to Boomi had two main phases, each dedicated to specific customer processes:

The first phase involved the migration of about 35 accounting flows (Bills, Credit Notes, Invoices etc.) for many large retail chains, with delivery in 3 months and in collaboration with the customer, merging the development phases with the training phase.

The second phase involved migration from Pentaho to Fastbook for Courier and Data Sharing flows. As a result of the need to move data flows between multiple FTP/Sftp systems, a dynamic solution was studied and fine-tuned that, once the systems involved were defined, allows thanks to appropriate parameterizations, to transfer all the necessary files between the systems involved, in a bidirectional way. In addition, the management of requests for collection of returned goods at points of sale, which was previously done manually by merchandisers by connecting to the Gsped portal, was automated.

For thescheduling API,given the need to keep track of the execution characteristics of the various processes in Boomi, a process was designed, proposed and implemented that would actually extract the various execution modes of the individual processes and after appropriate formatting in excel format, is shared via e-mail with those who have to deal with the timing of the processes.

The results

A partner who specializes in Boomi is critical to starting off in the right direction and meeting time and quality goals.

Mind-Mercatis first wanted to provide training to Emmelibri specialists so that they could themselves become masters of their own system and judge the quality of the work:

Prices, orders, and stock conveyed by a single BSE, which monitors all stages and steps of updating and distribution.

Increased data integrity among different group companies.

Consolidation and simplification of IT management.

Real-time monitoring of platform status.