Arnold Logistics Finds EDI Flexibility with Boomi

Corrected: December 13, 2006

by Alex Woodie

As a full-service logistics provider, Arnold Logistics of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, needs to remain flexible to meet its customers' needs. That desire for agility was the primary reason that it developed its own warehouse management system on the OS/400 platform, which enables it to tailor specific IT solutions for each of its clients. When it came time to install a new EDI and business-to-business communication solution, the company found a product in Boomi's EDI System that matched the flexibility of the rest of the IT department.

Arnold Logistics provides hundreds of customers with a range of logistic services, including warehousing, fulfillment, packaging, and reverse logistics (returns), from more than 30 distribution centers in four states, including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and Nevada. In each case, the company creates a custom set of services designed to address its customers' specific issues, such as designing an automated picking and sorting system for one of the world's largest software publishers, or smoothly handling the continuous addition of new products for one of the world's biggest food companies, for whom Arnold operates more than a million square feet of warehouse.

Like all third-party logistics providers, Arnold Logistics has developed strong competencies in supply chain management, and it basically rents this expertise out to others. "It's making sure they have proper inventory levels, validating loads, shipping on business rules, first in, first out," says Eric Fennel, the company's systems analyst. "We manage all that headache stuff so the customer doesn't have to worry about it."

IT plays a huge role at Arnold Logistics, and at the center of the IT infrastructure is a homegrown OS/400-based WMS called "Bluegrass" that it developed in ILE RPG and CL about four years ago. Arnold developed its own WMS for a couple of reasons. First, its existing WMS was getting old. Secondly, developing their own would enable the company to customize the services it offers to customers.

"Having written our own system makes it easy to be responsive," Fennel says. "Going with a package, we'd feel a loss of flexibility. We get some pretty peculiar requests from customers." For example, having their own WMS makes it easier to write or format special reports, or to e-mail notifications of EDI or FTP transactions. It also enables Arnold to enforce business processes in its customers' supply chains.

Being in the third-party logistics business, EDI is a key aspect of what Arnold Logistics does. Since 2001, the use of EDI--in particular, AS2 and XML transport mechanisms--has been growing among the company's customers, according to Fennel. To satisfy this growing demand, the company started looking for a new EDI package.

The company could have written its own EDI translator (as the company eventually would do with Bluegrass), but that may have introduced some problems the company wasn't prepared to deal with, Fennel says. "Building something like that would have been a pretty decent effort and at that time we weren't prepared for it," Fennel says. "The EDI translator handles the error trapping and that can't fail. There's all kinds of things that can go wrong."

So the company began the hunt for a prepackaged EDI translator. Fennel had heard about a product from a fellow Pennsylvania company called Boomi, and so he set up a demo. Fennel was pleased with what he saw, particularly the GUI in the Boomi EDI System, which employs a graphical flow chart for setting up and mapping B2B connections. "It has a GUI that looks like a flow chart or process flow, where you can route data based on content," Fennel says. "It's very modular and sensible."

However, Fennel had qualms about implementing the Java-based Boomi product, which looked nothing like the other big-name OS/400 EDI translators he had used. "It just didn't look like what I was familiar with," he says. "I was prejudiced against [Boomi] because it didn't look like a standard AS/400 translator. And I had concerns if it was robust enough."

In the end, the flexibility of Boomi won out, and the product was implemented at Arnold Logistics in 2001. Since then, the product, which was originally installed on the OS/400 server later moved to a Windows Server 2003 box running SQL Server, has processed millions of advanced ship notices, shipping confirmations, and other EDI and B2B content for Arnold Logistics and its customers.

What really pleases Fennel about the Boomi EDI System is separation of the transport mechanism from the content and format of the EDI. "If somebody says, 'We've been FTP-ing this, but now we want to do this through AS2,' it's very easy to set that up, and you don't have to worry about screwing up any of the content," he says.

Fennel says the flexibility of Boomi has paid off. One of the most common requests by Arnold's customers is to receive e-mail notifications whenever shipment confirmations are sent out. "In traditional EDI, that's very cumbersome" and involves custom programming, Fennel says. "Boomi allowed us the flexibility to do some of these things in less than five minutes."

While EDI is supposed to be a standard that companies adhere to, the fact is that most companies make their own modifications to EDI documents, and that complicates the integration. "It might be X.12, but everybody's got their own. They might put data in a different place," Fennel says. "We connect to surprisingly good number of AS/400 customers, and most of them are building their own interfaces. It was shocking how quickly we can respond to a request or a change to the interface."

Only a few issues have surfaced with the product, most of which had to do with the JDBC connection to the DB2/400 database. One persistent issue that was resolved involved failed passwords. "For some reason if a password failed, the '400 has a mechanism to throw up a prompt. But ultimately this was consumed by the translator," Fennel says. "It turned out to be a peculiarity of the '400 and something that we needed for JDBC." SQL performance was also an issue with OS/400 V5R1 and V5R2, but these issues were solved as a result of the SQL Optimizer that IBM enhanced with i5/OS V5R3 and V5R4. In some cases, Fennel worked directly with Boomi's R&D personnel to resolve issues, and Boomi's developers have been known to call Fennel when dealing with other OS/400 customers.

Fennel's fears about the capabilities of the Boomi product turned out to be unfounded. "It's proven to be very robust and stable," Fennel says. "For about a fifth of the price [of a traditional OS/400 EDI translator], it often does twice as much work, and often much more quickly."

Fennel recommends Boomi to any potential customer. "I would not want to live without it, in the sense it does its job and does its job very well. I don't have to worry about whether it's going to do its job and work," he says. "Part of the reason we invested in the translator is the same reason we built our own WMS--the flexibility. The first time we set it up, it became obvious it was very flexible, and anything that lets us respond to issues is very good for us."

This article has been corrected. Arnold Logistics services hundreds of customers, not just 15. The company also runs more than 30 distribution centers, not just four. IT Jungle regrets the error.