Griffin Technology is a company that designs and develops consumer electronics accessories. They implemented Liaison Technologies' data integration platform to help manage their growing business needs, including increased order volumes, international expansion, and trading partner requirements. The Liaison platform includes forms-based EDI, barcode printing, mapping and integration tools, and an enterprise service bus to connect different systems. This helped Griffin Technology scale up to processing over 10,000 orders per month from 40 trading partners around the world.

1. Master the Balancing Act:
Cost-Effective and Scalable Data Integration
Featuring valued customer
@LiaisonTech

2. @LiaisonTech
About Griffin Technology
• Company founded in 1992, Privately held
• One of the world's foremost creators of
accessories for home, mobile, and
personal technology.
• All products are conceived, designed,
and developed in-house and continue to
push the envelope of the industry they
helped create.
• Began making Macintosh monitor
adapters, continued growth in consumer
electronics market, launched into retail
boom with iPod accessories in 2005
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3. @LiaisonTech
Issues
• Pre-EDI
– Could not handle large order volume (Direct To Store)
– Lack of customer communication (no ASN)
– 1500 orders a month
– Web solutions provided by each trading partner
– One website per partner
• Webforms limitations
– Manual rekey (no integration)
– Potential for mistakes high
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4. @LiaisonTech
Global Requirements
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Retail locations reaching six continents increased
requirements and complexities.

5. @LiaisonTech
Customer Compliance
• Electronic Data Interchange
– Purchase Orders
– Invoices
– Advance Ship Notices
– Functional Acknowledgements
– SSCC Barcode labels
• Challenges
– Guidelines change regularly and companies have issues
keeping up with the changes.
– Charge-backs
• Considerations
– Little or no installation/configuration
– Low upfront costs and total cost of ownership
– Rapid implementations
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6. @LiaisonTech
Manage Your Business
• Liaison Technologies offers a variety of platform and on-premise
products to assist organizations meet initial trading partner
compliance requirements and architect large scale middleware
infrastructures.
• The goal of implementations large and small is to make
incremental, re-usable investments in technology to reduce costs
and meet customer demands.
• A team of integration and EDI experts delivers all the support
required to maintain your system allowing you to focus on core
competencies, not EDI.
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7. @LiaisonTech
B2B Integration Platforms and Products
Enterprise Application Integration
Data Exchange Platform
Athena
Supplier
Web
Delta & ECS
Enterprise
Delta
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8. @LiaisonTech
Liaison Product Evolution at Griffin
• Vista
• Forms based EDI
• Barcode printing
Trading Partner
Compliance
Integrated EDI
• ECS & Delta
• Communication and
process automation
• Data translation
• ECS & Delta
Enterprise
• Scalable platform
• Web service platform
for internal integration
Enterprise
Application
Integration
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9. @LiaisonTech
Forms Based EDI
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Athena makes the viewing, creation, and
exchange of EDI documents as easy as e-mail.
New messages arrive in the Inbox and sent
messages live in the Sent folder.

10. @LiaisonTech
Forms Based EDI: TPK
• When you create or reply to an
EDI document in Athena, the
appropriate TPK is invoked and
an attractive form displays
• Athena compares the data in
your outgoing EDI document to
your trading partner’s
specification.
• Automated functional
acknowledgment generation
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11. @LiaisonTech
Forms Based EDI: Barcode Printing
• Create and print bar
code labels right from
Athena.
• The printed bar codes
match the bar code
numbers that are sent
with your advance ship
notices, allowing your
trading partners to cross
reference shipments
when they arrive.
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12. @LiaisonTech
Forms Based EDI: Document Management
• Quickly locate any type of message (e-mail or EDI) across your
entire account using Athena’s broad keyword search field
• Export the raw EDI document, forward it as an attachment, or
translate to a flat-file format
• Use the built-in reporting module report module to quickly
summarize a variety of EDI activities such as:
– EDI documents that have not yet been acknowledged by your
trading partners
– All sent or received EDI documents
• Configure Athena to alert via e-mail, the arrival of a new EDI
document
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13. @LiaisonTech
Drivers
• Time consuming process to
input inbound and outbound
documents
• Higher transactional volume
and number of trading partners
• Data quality suffered due to
manual entry
Objectives
• Provide on-premise platform
for development of all current
and future trading partner
requirements
• Direct FTP and AS2
communications with trading
partners
• Event and scheduled based
processes
• Enable enterprise level
reporting and monitoring
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Integration

14. @LiaisonTech
Delta: Mapping Interface
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Delta supports both source- and target-driven mapping
through simple drag and drop and sophisticated function
based rules.

15. @LiaisonTech
Delta: Testing and Debugging
• The Diagnostic pane logs
the details of the test run,
alerting you to any errors
that were encountered
• Output Files pane displays
the temporary file(s) that
were created as a result of
the test run
• View source data and
Delta’s current position
within it
• Stepping through one or
more of the remaining rules
one at a time
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16. @LiaisonTech
Integration: ECS
• Data flow in ECS is governed by
input channels, output channels,
and event rules
• Components are configured from
ECS’ Management Console utility
• Typically, event rules are tied to
input channels, telling ECS what
to do with data when it arrives
• System-defined exceptions, user-defined
data exceptions, and
user-defined Delta exceptions can
be defined to notify administrators
when errors or conditions are met.
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17. @LiaisonTech
Major ERP – How and Why
• Problems with existing small ERP system
– Limited integration (no direct database access)
– Major performance issues
– Order entry bottleneck
– 1,500 orders per month
– Limited financial G/L tracking capabilities
• Areas needed for growth
– Enhanced external integration capabilities
– Financial reporting
– Forecasting, MRP/Ordering management
• New ERP system requirements
– Scalable, increased performance
– Flexible/configurable
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18. @LiaisonTech
Major ERP - Implementation
• A chance to rebuild and redesign
– Rewrite maps from ground up for new backend
– On-the-fly new address creation using WebServices/SOAP
– Enhanced error checking, duplicate PO check
• The need for real-time integration
– Fast order turnaround mandated by Trading Partners
– Batch processing greatly minimized. Reduces strain on both
ERP and EDI.
• Ability to scale
– ERP is multi-server enterprise level system which EDI system
must continue to grow with.
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19. @LiaisonTech
An affordable ESB
• ECS and Delta together can be viewed as an Enterprise Service Bus.
• Allows for creative solutions helping to overcome business process
mismatches
System 1
System 2
System 3
Trading
Partner
Trading
Partner
ECS

20. @LiaisonTech
Current State
• Stable, scalable environment that provides ability to quickly design
and deploy new projects.
– 10,000 orders per month
– 20% of orders, 80% of revenue
– 40 EDI Trading Partners
• New projects
– International 3PL Warehouse EDI Integration
– Tighter integration with JD Edwards transportation modules
(carrier tracking, ASNs)
– PLM System currently being installed. Potential for EDI
integration with manufactures.
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21. @LiaisonTech
Solutions
• Data Integration
• Data Management
• Data Security
Visit Griffin
Technology here
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• Global headquarters in Atlanta
• European offices in Finland,
Netherlands, Sweden, UK
• More than 7000 customers
worldwide in over 46 countries
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Additional Resources