TIE’s eVision Produces Award Winning Results

Company Profile:
National Gypsum Company is a fully integrated building products manufacturer and one of the leading gypsum board producers in the world. Placed end-to-end, the company’s annual gypsum board production would travel around tghe earth over 14 times. National Gypsum also offers a full line of interior finishing products including joint compounds, tape, and textures. Its growing cement board product line has a strong customer base in the United States and several other countries.

Situation Analysis:
National Gypsum was seeking a more effective method for electronic communication with its large number of vendors. It was essential that it find a solution that both delivers XML and traditional EDI documents and cuts down the errors associated with erroneous codes. National Gypsum also understood that by improving electronic communication, it could more effectively speed merchandise to the warehouse and storefront. This would reduce inventory costs and increase sales.

Challenges:
National Gypsum determined that many of the errors it was finding could be traced back to its current EDI provider, causing increased costs and inefficiencies with the supply chain. Finding an EDI vendor flexible enough to handle all of its Trading Partner business requirements as well as robust enough to process the massive amounts of incoming and outgoing documents for large big box building supply retailers was the challenge.

Recommended TIE Solution:
TIE’s eVision Enterprise offers the industry’s leading Business-to-Business Integration solution, including applications for advanced data transformation, integration, and workflow. Designed for large distribution companies with a focus on eCommerce, it includes XML, EDI, workflow and translation management, and database translation engines that are powerful enough to process large volumes of data and eliminate the many processing barriers that hinder rapid XML/EDI translation.

Results:
According to Larry Peters, National Gypsum E-Business Manager, “eVision gave us the flexibility to react to the moving target that is our Trading Partner’s needs. So much so that our largest Trading Partner, a major association of independent gypsum dealers, presented us with its ‘Vendor of the Year’ Award for the third time in five years due in large part to eVision’s responsiveness and flexibility.”

Using a separate eVision test environment, National Gypsum implemented bi-annual disaster recovery sessions in coordination with a national big box building supply retailer. These sessions, which allow the disaster recovery functions to be tested in an actual EDI environment, have proven to be invaluable by enabling them to meet or exceed the necessary recovery time objectives in order to maintain business continuity with their Partners.

In cases where Trading Partners chose to trade XML documents, National Gypsum enabled TIE’s Integrator solution, a scalable 100% Java application designed to integrate systems information whether the data is derived from EDI, XML, legacy accounting or manufacturing applications, or enterprise-wide distributed database systems.