The Client:

Arneg SpA, a company leader in the refrigeration industry, with offices and facilities around the world. The group has 16 factories around the world, approximately 2,250 employees and an annual turnover which stood at 450 million euros.

The problem:

Solve a complex problem of data integration and coexistence of two different ERP systems present on different platforms and geographically distant. The needs expressed by the customer were three:

• Synchronize in a permanent, bidirectional way and in real time the demographic information between the account part of the Brazilian software (on Informix database) and the management part of the group (on AS/400 platform with IBM DB2 database), all without changes to ERP starting, and with lens and intercontinental networks.
• Manage in real time a complete environment for testing, easily configurable and replicable.
• Being able to manage the process of updating of data without specific know-how of Informix, since culture of enterprise computing Arneg relies on other types of databases.

The solution:

The customer chose Duplo because answered all the questions made during the analysis of the problem. In particular:

• Reliability and know-how of the partners. Arket is a company that for over ten years creates integration projects between information systems, with many projects successful developed, in particular with Duplo, which allows the alignment of data in real time.
• Duplo is able to synchronize data on different databases, capturing changes that occur in the affected tables from the source database and apply them to the target system.
• Duplo ensures efficiency even during the temporary unavailability of the communication line and / or the temporary unavailability of the database for maintenance, thanks to the particular characteristics of the product, able to manage the capture of data even in off-line mode in order to restore the exact sequence when returns the availability of the line and the database.
• Possibility to manage different time zones automatically and without the needing of constant supervision by the IT staff, including any reboots independently through a self-management system of anomalies, all integrated by an efficient system of monitoring and tracking of events.

Advantages for the client:

Without changing the whole structure of the information system and without any application, Arneg has integrated the accounting system on Brazilian Informix with the italian ERP system on IBM DB2. Thanks to the use of Duplo, the integration project between the two systems, lasted a few days, necessary for action planning, installation and the configuration of the product. The acquisition of the control elements of the process via the Duplo console took a few hours of training and allowed to build a network of warnings about possible inefficiencies related to the lines of communication, the unavailability of the database for maintenance or backup or other problems derived from software updates of the two applications.

"Duplo solved in a simple, fast and reliable way, a complex problem of integration and coexistence of two ERP systems residing on different platforms and geographically dispersed. Duplo has also provided a way to request computing services to the remote system, creating an SOA architecture without having to provide the technological bases normally required. We can test and implement the new ERP gradually, always keeping in line the starting data, updated in "real time", as if they were both in the same AS400. Arket has always been diligent and efficient in responding to our requests."

Claudio Canepa
CIO
Arneg Group