Eating up Sterling Integrator Migration at Oberto
A Sterling Integrator Success Story

THE COMPANY:

Founded in Seattle in 1918, the Oberto Sausage Company is one of the nation’s top beef jerky producers and snack food brands. For more than 90 years, three generations of the Oberto family have been making fine quality meat snacks which are now available online and in convenience, grocery and mass market retailers nationwide.

THE CHALLENGE :

When the Oberto Sausage Company launched a nationwide campaign to accelerate growth and solidify its position as an industry brand leader, B2B systems were put on high alert. The company processes 90% of all sales order transactions via EDI, explained Programmer/Analyst Sean Vasquez. “Without EDI, we wouldn’t be able to compete in the market. It’s vital to our success,” said Vasquez. So, with the prospect of on-boarding several hundred new trading partners, Oberto developed a long term strategy to move to Sterling Integrator for B2B communications and translation. Both communications and translation needed to be upgraded urgently. “We were running Gentran Server for UNIX, and our older AS2 version of Gentran Integration Suite was out of support,” said Vasquez. Bisync communications also needed to be upgraded to AS2. A comprehensive Sterling Integrator upgrade was planned, but time constraints and project costs posed major obstacles and subsequently had delayed the project.

THE SOLUTION:

On Oxford Consulting Group’s recommendation, Oberto included the implementation of B2B Framework® for Sterling Integrator in their upgrade project, using it to dramatically reduce business process development and streamline the set-up and management of trading partners. Now implemented, B2B Framework® also allows for the efficient management of all B2B documents. At the time of implementation, with 46 trading partners, Oberto was sending and receiving 15 different document types spanning multiple EDI versions from 4010 to 5010 UCS, amounting to over 1,700 documents monthly. With the inclusion of B2B Framework®, Oberto was able to relaunch their migration effort with a much smaller budget and time frame.

THE PROCESS:

The Oxford team worked on-site with Oberto for a week to configure Sterling Integrator and install B2B Framework®. During that time, they easily created Oberto-specific Framework rules, identities, code lists etc. via a Microsoft Excel import. By week’s end, Oberto was running Sterling Integrator in parallel with B2B Framework®. “Oxford gave me documentation and instructions tailored to our installation, which has been very helpful,” said Vasquez. Then, after two weeks of carbon-copying to test the new AS2 mailslot, all production communications were switched over to the Framework-supported Sterling Integrator system. It took only two days to convert 84 maps for Oberto’s existing trading partners from Gentran Server for UNIX to Sterling Integrator. New trading partners are on-boarded directly into the new Sterling Integrator system.

THE RESULTS:

“We had a 50% savings in implementation costs thanks to B2B Framework®,” said Vasquez. “In today’s economic environment, we needed to keep costs to a minimum and Oxford Consulting helped us achieve that goal.” Document management and on-boarding trading partners is now faster and easier added Vasquez. “B2B Framework® allows us to have complete visibility at every step a document goes through in our EDI process. I have no idea how I’d accomplish that using Sterling Integrator without B2B Framework®.”

Oberto first worked with the Oxford team in 2002. Today Vasquez says, “They [Oxford Consulting] are about creating long term partnerships with organizations to help them achieve their goals. I trust Oxford Consulting’s opinion and know I can count on them to give me a fair price and great service.”

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Company

Oberto Sausage Company


Industry

Consumer Packaged Goods


Location

Seattle, WA


Business

Meat Snacks Manufacturer


Environment

Windows Server 2003/MySQL


Key Challenge

Minimize the costs of upgrading bisync communications and older versions of Gentran Server and Gentran Integration Suite to avoid the risk of unsupported communications and translation platforms.