Gate Petroleum Licenses Boomi for AS/400 Integration

Published: September 4, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Gate Petroleum Company, a multifaceted business based in Jacksonville, Florida, has licensed Boomi's application integration software to make it easier to connect to its OS/400-based back office and retail systems, and to drive its B2B initiatives, Boomi announced last week.

Gate Petroleum Company is a diverse company that started out operating service stations in the 1960s. Since then, it's expanded to more than 200 gas stations and convenience stores in several southeastern states, and offers other fleet services to truckers. But Gate has other varied interests, including a series of private clubs and resorts, a real-estate development business, and a manufacturing arm that sells pre-cast concrete products to the building industry.

Like all businesses, Gate counts on a series of suppliers to keep product moving. At some point, the company realized that its IT systems had grown in such a way that they weren't as efficient as they could be. So the company looked at bringing in some application integration software to hook the various systems together.

"We evaluated our technology infrastructure and realized we could significantly improve business processes if we pulled together information from standalone applications and connected directly with our trading partners," said Ben Cebrian, Gate's database manager. "We began evaluating integration software vendors, and after narrowing down the list from five contenders to three finalists, we selected the Boomi Integration Platform."

Gate's first project with Boomi was to set up electronic invoicing with its trading partners. Currently, the company relies on a paper-based process that involves manual re-keying. After implementing Boomi, Gate's suppliers can now submit invoice files in any format (flat file, XML, EDI, HTML), and the information is automatically entered into the company's ERP application and simultaneously sent to the appropriate retail store, all without any human intervention.

Gate is currently using Boomi with its pricebook, retail systems, accounts payable application, and general ledger, which reside on AS/400s and other systems. In the future, the company expects to start using Boomi for AS2 communication. "We're just getting started with the Boomi platform," Cebrian says.

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