Cordys improves business efficiency, lowers TCO and transforms customer service

Ahrend, an office furniture and supply designer and manufacturer, is streamlining key business processes by linking existing applications with Cordys ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), part of the Cordys Business Process Management Suite (BPMS).

The integration provides all Ahrend employees, whether account managers, sales support or customer services, to real-time access to all software applications and associated data via a single user interface.

As a result, the order process has been dramatically improved in terms of speed and accuracy, while the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) has been reduced largely due to application functionality being available to more employees.

Part of the Cordys SOA Grid, the ESB provides a fully distributed, multi-protocol messaging middleware that can connect incompatible systems and support communication between them. Cordys ESB provides the tools to quickly wrap proprietary business logic and expose it as web services so that they are available to any other service connected to the bus. 

Using Cordys, Ahrend has been able to seamlessly connect two key applications - pCon.Basket for offer management and pCon.Planner, for graph planning, with Triton, Ahrend’s ERP-system – both of which use the Office Furniture Modeling Language data model (OFML).

The successful integration initiative means that sales and support staff no longer have to manually transfer offer and planning data from the pCon-systems into the Triton system, saving considerable time and improving a process that was previously prone to errors.

“Cordys enables Ahrend to reduce the overall costs involved in the start-up, management and control of projects," said Paul Zuidema, Director, Ahrend. "As a result we are able to offer customers a much better overall experience which is something that we see as a key differentiator for Ahrend in the marketplace.”

“Having access to fully integrated and interoperable systems, touches and improves every aspect of our business.  From responding to customer enquiries, to providing proposals and budget indications, to conversion, planning, production and delivery of orders, Cordys provides real-time access to the information our employees need in order to provide a more positive experience for our customers.”

"As a business, Ahrend needs to be able to quickly add, change and view data, offers and customer order", said Michiel Oldenhof, Vice-President Sales for Cordys. "Providing combined access to various systems was critical in being able to give employees real-time access to this data."