The Company
One of the World's leading manufacturers of lightning products and fixtures based in the United States with a turnover of over US$ 2billion, employing 11,000 people and with operations throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

The Business Problem
The key challenge for the company was, how to achieve competitive advantage against its compeitors and provide a high level of customer service, by rapidly delivering e-business solutions. The company needed to integrate its business processes and get critical information to the right place at the right time in the right format to support the fast-paced demands of e-business. The key issue was how to build new systems and integrate them with existing business systems.

The Solution
Avangarde Consulting identified that the optimal solution was to develop processes that would allow the company to rapidly deliver its services in real Internet time by implementing e-Business Integration Solutions (e-BIS). e-BIS is the process of rapidly delivering scalable integration solutions that enable e-business to deliver on its promises. e-BIS solves the problem of integrating business processes and getting critical information to the right place at the right time in the right format to support the fast-paced demands of e-business. e-BIS is broadly applicable to all e-business initiatives ranging from consumer-oriented e-commerce, or business-to-business data exchange, customer relationship management or supply chain integration. The solution required not just the construction of new systems using new technology but most importantly ensuring the integration of the new systems with a wide variety of incompatible legacy systems. The consultant developed and implemented an e-Business Integration Solutions approach, which combined Integration Patterns and Integration Brokers, allowing the company to service its customers faster and make it all work in Internet time. e-BIS is broadly applicable to all e-business initiatives ranging from consumer-oriented e-commerce, or business-to-business data exchange, customer relationship management or supply chain integration.

The Benefits
Delivering the application systems allowed the company to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities e-business offered. Within one year of implementing the e-BIS solution the company was able to improve productivity by 25%, reduce costs by 15% and improve its bottom line by 30% .