ACCO Brands Leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware to Automate Communication Between Applications

ACCO Brands (NYSE: ABD), one of the world’s largest suppliers of branded office products, has selected Oracle products and technologies including, Oracle Fusion Middleware (www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/index.htm) , Oracle SOA Suite (www.oracle.com/us/technologies/soa/index.html) , Oracle WebLogic Server (www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/overview/index.html) , Oracle GlassFish Server (www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/application-server/oracle-glassfish-server/index.html) , Oracle JDeveloper (www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/overview/index.html) , the Oracle E-Business Suite (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/index.html) and Oracle Transportation Management (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/scm/018756.htm) .

The ACCO Brands solution was built as part of an Oracle Transportation Management implementation with BPEL processes delivering Shipment/Confirmation information between the Oracle E-Business Suite and PicK ticket Management System (PKMS)/ Distribution Center Management System (DCMS).

ACCO used Oracle Fusion Middleware, specifically Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle BPEL Process Manager (www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpel/overview/index.html) , a component of Oracle SOA Suite, to develop business processes to orchestrate across the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Transportation Management and PKMS/DCMS applications. The Oracle-based interface processes approximately 1,100-1,800 invoices within a 24 hour period.

The design and development for the SOA-based BPEL interfaces was completed in approximately four months. The project was implemented at the three major distribution centers of ACCO Brands’ U.S. operations and provides benefits for more than 80 percent of all shipments from U.S. businesses.

By running Oracle BPEL Process Manager on top of Oracle WebLogic Server, ACCO Brands has been able to view a process flow that spanned greater than 70K steps. The new SOA-based interfaces between the Oracle E-Business Suite and PKMS in the ACCO Brands solution have performed 400 percent faster with 20 percent more workload.

ACCO Brands is also leveraging Oracle GlassFish Server for its online training site (training.acco.com/) . Future functionality of the site will include the ability to e-mail preformatted key codes to customers and allow them to register for online training courses.

Oracle University training helped the ACCO Brands technical team gain new knowledge of SOA technology components and the Oracle Fusion Middleware tutorials on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) helped immensely with developing customizations in BPEL and stabilizing the system.

“Oracle’s out-of-the-box integration between the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Transportation Management was the biggest reason for us to choose Oracle Fusion Middleware,” said Royce Heaney, VP Global IT, ACCO Brands.

“Oracle JDeveloper is the most powerful IDE for SOA development and Oracle Fusion Middleware is definitely the easiest way to migrate to an extensible integration platform,” said Dheeraj Bhushan SOA & e-commerce team lead, ACCO Brands.