Application Integration Success Story

Petro-Canada

Petro-Canada is one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies, operating in both the upstream and downstream sectors of the industry in Canada and internationally. Petro-Canada is "Canada’s Gas Station," with a network of more than 1,400 retail locations, including 700 retail franchise locations across the country.

Challenge

Pricing and product information for Petro Canada’s large network retail locations was dispersed across various systems that “did not talk to each other.” The lack of interaction between their systems prevented Petro-Canada’s retailers from gaining an accurate real time view of their operations and resulted in the following business challenges:

  • Considerable latency in the retailers’ licensee fees being calculated
  • Retailers did not have an accurate picture of their current on-hand inventory until the end of each shift
  • Invoices arriving from EDI-enabled vendors had to be manually transmitted to retailers, resulting in increased time to pay vendors and occasional errors caused by duplicate data entry
  • Corporate or regional pricing promotions required a manual process in order to be reflected at the Point-Of-Sale often overwriting retailer-level pricing promotions

Solution

Working with Petro-Canada’s Retail Business division, Ideaca implemented Microsoft’s BizTalk Server as part of a project to replace the back office systems used by over 700 retail locations nationwide. The solution integrates 6 head office systems including: Corporate product and pricing systems, vendor invoicing systems and a third party service provider’s payroll system; with a new Dynamics AX ERP solution that was also implemented by Ideaca.

The BizTalk solution collects 300 000+ daily retail sales transactions across Canada to provide accurate real-time inventory information to retailers. Corporate and retailer-specific product, pricing and vendor information is sent via Biztalk to Petro- Canada’s Dynamics AX ERP solution, which also supplies product and price lists to each point of sale on a nightly basis.

The integrated solution leverages web services and adapters for File, FTP and SQL to provide interoperability across the systems based on Windows, Unix and mainframe platforms. The scalability features of Biztalk provide failover and load balancing as well as throttling of data into Dynamics AX.

Benefits

  • Improved data integrity across the systems and reduced need for human intervention
  • Ability to proactively resolve issues on retail location connectivity and data latency before retailers become aware and call support desk
  • Improved visibility into issues with Point-Of-Sale systems (alerting on POS resets)
  • Reduction in the amount of time required to implement future integration scenarios throughout the enterprise