Modern Data Exchange at Lekkerland with Customers and Suppliers

The project was carried out in a joint project organization with Lekkerland information systems GmbH and the previous service provider in an excellent 20-strong international team with the service provider Arvato Systems. Approximately 50% of the implementation took place at Arvato Systems' offshore location in Malaysia, so work on the project was carried out almost around the clock, taking advantage of the time zone, and significant cost benefits were also achieved.

"At no point in the project was it noticeable, either internally or externally in the direction of the service recipient, that different companies - client and service provider - were working here on implementing a project goal. It is fair to say that there was an extraordinary, cross-company understanding of being perceived as a team and working together to ensure the desired success against all challenges," confirms Stephan Koerfers, Head of Partner Connectivity Solutions, Lekkerland information systems GmbH.

The topic of multi-project management and dealing with additional customer requirements and further projects was high on the agenda and demanded maximum flexibility from the international project team: During the project term, both the hosting partner and the ERP system were changed, and Lekkerland got a new owner with the REWE Group with all the activities resulting from a merger project. At the same time, interfaces were also harmonized in this context to reduce maintenance efforts in the future.

Another challenge was that the interface formats with the partners were partly fixed in contracts so that no changes were to be made on the part of the partners. To carry out interfaces as far as possible without the test involvement of the business partners, the message processing was broken down into two steps. In step one, the message was converted to a standard EAI format on the Lekkerland side. In the second step, the mapping to the format requested by the customer took place. Accurate data from the interfaces before and after the second mapping step could be used automatically because a black box test meant that a high quality of the converted interfaces was achieved with little testing effort.