Information Builders > Case Studies > Disc Brakes Australia Accelerates Ordering With Custom e-Commerce Solution

Disc Brakes Australia Accelerates Ordering With Custom e-Commerce Solution

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America
Europe

Country

Australia
United States

Product

DBA Connect
WebFOCUS
WebFOCUS Portal
WebFOCUS RESTFul Web Services adapter

Tech Stack

Cloud-based eCommerce portal
RESTful Web Services
ERP system

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Supply Chain Visibility

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

Disc Brakes Australia (DBA) is an Australian-owned manufacturer, designer, and global marketer of after-market and original equipment (OE) disc brake pads and rotors. For over 40 years, DBA has specialized in the motorsport markets, with major operations in Australia, America, and Europe. DBA's customer base includes 150 dealers who serve approximately 30,000 end customers, ranging from small mom-and-pop automotive shops to major automotive dealers. DBA's ordering system was heavily dependent on phone orders from across Australia's five time zones and its overseas markets. As business volume escalated, the call center was getting overloaded, leading to the need for a more efficient and cost-effective solution.

The Challenge

Disc Brakes Australia (DBA) is an Australian-owned manufacturer, designer, and global marketer of after-market and original equipment (OE) disc pads and brake rotors. For many years, DBA took orders the old fashioned way: sales representatives answered calls and manually entered the orders into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. They had to field orders from across Australia’s five time zones and several overseas markets. It took several minutes to receive an order, create a pick list, process the order, and transmit the information to the warehouse for fulfillment. As business volume escalated, the call center was getting overloaded. DBA decided to automate the order entry process with a new e-commerce system, but they didn’t have an IT staff that could create such a system in-house. After evaluating proposals from systems integrators and application development firms, they asked Information Builders to design and build an order-entry system that could link to the ERP system via RESTful Web Services.

The Solution

Information Builders custom-designed a cloud-based eCommerce portal called “DBA Connect” that links to the ERP system. The eCommerce applications makes it easy for customers to enter the required information by stepping them through the process via a graphical user interface. Behind the scenes, the RESTful Web Service adapter connects to the database via the ABEL API. This allows WebFOCUS to extract product configuration details for rotors, pads, and related parts from the ERP system, display them in the eCommerce portal, and pass those parameters into a shopping cart for fulfillment. Other screens in the portal display account balances, previous orders, delivery addresses, and commercial B2B information. WebFOCUS manages all inputs and outputs to this self-service eCommerce portal via web services interfaces. With the DBA Connect application running in the background, DBA staff members can smoothly control administrative functions, such as adding new users. Information Builders maintains the system by uploading files each month and performing minor patches and updates.

Operational Impact

Customers can now order products in a self-service environment, both domestically and overseas.
System reliability is very high, and order-processing time is much shorter.
Order-processing time has plummeted, the associated costs are decreasing, and DBA’s order-handling capacity is expected to increase substantially.
The moment the customer submits an order online, the pick list simultaneously pops up in the warehouse, streamlining fulfillment.

Quantitative Benefit

By removing call center reps from the order-to-cash workflow, it has reduced processing time by 75 percent.
In many cases, orders that required 10 to 20 minutes of a staff member’s time take one minute or less.
Once fully deployed, it is expected to handle 300 to 350 orders per day – a nearly ten-fold increase.