Success Stories

Client: Harbinger

Business Issue
E*B & STX are Harbinger's mainframe EDI products. E*B and its client base were bought by Harbinger from GEIS. These products were not Y2K compliant and Harbinger did not have the in-house technical expertise to enhance these products or to provide satisfactory levels of customer support. As a result, customers were switching to other vendors and overall customer satisfaction was very low. In 1997, Inorbit identified these issues and presented to Harbinger a solution. Harbinger accepted Inorbit's proposal and contracted with Inorbit for a multi-year assignment to perform system enhancements, Y2K upgrades, and all levels (1,2,3) of customer support for Harbinger's customer base. The customer base included 150 of the fortune 500 companies and governmental agencies.

Business Benefits/Results
Inorbit provided full time customer support over dedicated phone lines, increasing customer satisfaction. Inorbit also upgraded Harbinger's products to satisfy customer issues with mapping, reporting, backup and recovery procedures and Y2K defects. Work was done remotely and on-site depending on the clients needs. As a result of the increased customer satisfaction and additional services, Harbinger was able to retain its customer base and, in addition, Inorbit was instrumental in selling Harbinger's TLE / NT and Unix product as a replacement for over thirty mainframe EDI translators.

Client: Major Manufacturer

Business Issue
The manufacturer had to reduce their costs and cycle time for processing orders and customer inquiries. Their process consisted of time and resource intensive phone and fax procedures that were error prone. Many of their buyers and suppliers did not have advanced systems with built in capabilities for electronic commerce, but conducting electronic transactions was a requirement.

Business Benefits/Results
Inorbit's consultants designed, and then implemented a solution that turned a time and resource intensive process into a state-of-the-art e-commerce operation. The solution took into account many customers non-native ability to conduct electronic commerce.

The technical implementation consisted of a farm of clustered Weblogic and database servers running a pure J2EE application that gave web-based access to all of their suppliers and buyers who did not have in-house systems or any customer who wanted to utilize a 24x7x365 web based interface. This immediately reduced the need for human intervention. For clients that had internal systems, a hub and spoke architecture consisting of webMethods was implemented in order to conduct real-time XML and EDI transactions. As a result, the manufacturer had one interface to all of their trading partners, maximizing their investment and substantially reducing the amount of errors throughout the supply chain.

Client: Warnaco Inc.

Business Issue
Warnaco needed the ability to create and monitor international shipments. Warnaco had found itself being bombarded with calls from customers to identify where shipments were and there was a large amount of effort needed to locate the shipments. Also, their legacy ERP system was not Y2K compliant and did not satisfy Warnaco's business needs.

Business Benefits/Results
Before a technical solution could be designed, extensive research, return on investment and requirements analysis was conducted. The Inorbit team worked with Warnaco to perform business process analysis, process mapping, systems analysis, and gap analysis to identify the solutions to Warnaco's needs. Warnaco could not afford any downtime or loss of current critical functionality, and didn't have the leisure for a multi-year implementation cycle.

Because of Inorbit's experience, a strong and timely technical solution was proposed and was implemented exclusively by the Inorbit team. The implementation moved quickly from specification to design to go-live.

In this time, the Rockport system was installed to track the international shipments. The legacy product was replaced with SAP on Windows NT. All of the electronic transactions, such as Purchase Orders, Invoices, Advance Ship Notices and Shipment Tracking documents were designed and implemented with Sterling's Gentran and SAP. Gentran provided the link to all of the external clients and the IDOC interface was used to integrate with the ERP system.

All of the legacy data was extracted, transformed and loaded into the new systems. End to end testing was done with vendors, brokers, customs, and domestic retailers. Inorbit's internal testing and training was crucial to the acceptance and the successful launch of the new system.