Customer Story
Amway India
Before Connect CDC, some Amway India data required a full day for data replication – now it’s available immediately
Amway India depends on both a custom-developed IBM i ERP application and a Microsoft SQL Server Windows-based e-commerce Suite. The two systems must share data, but keeping them in synch was a problem. Amway needed an automated, real-time data sharing solution.
E-commerce is an important component of Amway India’s growth strategy. Sales through this channel have increased to 31% of the company’s business in the past two years. Greater use of e-commerce promises to improve Amway India’s profitability because e-commerce lowers the cost of order processing (compared to traditional sales channels).
Data sharing between the ERP and e-commerce applications presented a problem for Amway. In the past, Amway India transferred data between the two systems at intervals that depended on the nature of the data.
Most bulk transfers were done at night to avoid impacting system performance during busy daytime hours. As a result, the e-commerce databases were out of date. While some data was 10 minutes behind the ERP, other data was a day or two old.
After many considerations, Amway India determined that the data replication capabilities of Precisely’s data integration offering Connect could best meet its data-sharing requirements. This decision was largely based on:
- The small load the software places on the source and target databases
- The solution’s ability to fully automate the cross-platform replication processes
- Amway India’s ability to monitor the health of replication processes across all platforms
Connect replicates data changes between databases in real-time. Those databases can use different DBMSs, running on different hardware and operating systems. Connect can also replicate data bi-directionally, so users can apply updates anywhere and ensure current data is available quickly and automatically, regardless of the database platforms.
Amway India uses Connect to replicate data in real-time from its ERP System running on IBM i and Db2 to its e-commerce application running on Windows and SQL Server. It used to take from 10 minutes to over 24 hours for information to be available on the e-commerce database, but now all data is available almost immediately after it is entered or updated.
