The Challenge

Enable modern applications throughout a distributed enterprise to leverage customer event data from a large central ERP securely at a global scale. This had to be accomplished without increasing the load on the already-strained ERP system or jeopardizing support from the ERP vendor (which precluded making modifications to the ERP application or database schemas).

The Solution

I led the team to rapidly prototype and then construct a system that used native capabilities of the core database technology of the ERP from a mirror to create a real-time series of events for every customer transaction and publish those events to a wide range of subscribers within the enterprise. Along the way, we assisted the ERP hosting team with diagnosing the root cause of performance issues they had been experiencing and identified lasting, affordable solutions.

Our final solution enabled each division access to the data for their customers, hosted on their preferred platform (both self-hosted and cloud-hosted services), without creating inter-service dependencies that would slow innovation.

The Results

The solution significantly reduced the barriers to adopting external SaaS products for specialized needs, enabling each business unit to select different marketing, sales, fulfillment, and communication tools to best fit their purposes. This in turn let the organization de-emphasize more expensive, centralized technology decisions (that required adopting a single solution that could meet every unit’s needs), lowering overall enterprise cost and making it easier to make cost/benefit decisions within each business unit.