US LBM Holdings, LLC is one of the largest building products distributors in the United States. With more than $11 billion in gross sales last year and a footprint in 37 states, the Atlanta-based company powers much of its fast growth through acquisitions. To onboard the new businesses and to integrate data and systems quickly, the company relies on a modern cloud strategy. US LBM worked with Khoj Information Technology to build a custom Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platform based on Azure Integration Services—a high impact middleware solution that brings together the company’s essential applications, data, and processes. Not only does it speed up order fulfillment and enable near–real-time logistics planning, but it also supports ongoing innovation at US LBM. For example, the company recently relaunched its popular mobile app for making and tracking orders precisely and in near real time. It’s the kind of competitive advantage that a fast-growing company needs as it moves forward in today’s market.
“Azure Integration Services provides a highly stable and manageable solution to connect our vast array of ERP systems. EAI allows us to bring value to acquisitions more quickly.”
Greg Bossert, Vice President of Enterprise Applications, US LBM
Challenges lead to a cloud-centric integration platform
US LBM is the largest privately owned, full-line distributor of specialty building materials in the United States. With more than 400 locations, the company benefits from local expertise backed by nationwide reach. Last year alone, US LBM gained 46 locations—expanding its need for end-to-end visibility for order processing stakeholders, including sales reps, order dispatchers, truck drivers, and the contractors who purchase materials. However, an aging back-office integration solution was slowing the company’s expansion plans.
“The lumber and building materials industry tends to be heavily invested in on-premises legacy technology,” explains Greg Bossert, US LBM Vice President of Enterprise Applications. “As we acquire businesses, we sometimes need to continue operating and integrating this legacy technology.”
US LBM runs Epicor BisTrack enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools on Azure to manage core business processes, including new orders. Order information is passed to Descartes, a software as a service–based (SaaS-based) route planning and optimization tool used by the drivers, dispatchers, and operational management to improve shipping and delivery.
The problem lay in between these tools—an integration system developed well over a decade ago. Based on state-of-the-art technology for its time (Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010), the solution retrieved orders in batches that ran several times a day, taking between 60 to 90 minutes to run. On top of that, a new order took 15 to 30 minutes or more to cycle through the system.
As the company continued to onboard new divisions on BisTrack across the United States, the IT team had very real concerns about the performance and scalability of the existing integration system. Bossert explains the need, “We wanted improvements in line with our go-forward strategy on architecture, which is cloud first and allows for subscription-based licensing to scale with US LBM’s quickly growing business. It was important that the new middleware solution aligned with these requirements.”
Tracking a route to the cloud
The go-forward strategy pivoted on modern cloud services to replace the existing integration solution and was designed to support easy onboarding for all divisions using Descartes. Like many companies, US LBM found the pay-as-you-go model of platform as a service (PaaS) appealing. Replacing the capital expense of software licenses with the operational expense of a cloud subscription frees the IT budget for other modernization efforts.
The company also liked the idea of offloading management and operations responsibilities to a cloud vendor. But which one? US LBM teamed up with Khoj Information Technology to research integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
Ajay Dhingra, the Founder and President of Khoj Information Technology and Chief Solution Architect on the project, recalls the vetting process. “We evaluated top integration products, but they required a big initial expenditure. With a PaaS solution, US LBM could start small and grow over time as its needs evolved, and leadership liked the flexibility of that approach.”
At the time, US LBM was also considering consolidating its datacenters using Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS), so the teams turned their attention to Azure-based integration approaches.
“Azure provides a very rich ecosystem,” Dhingra points out. “We saw that Azure Integration Services can handle the integration between an ERP solution like Epicor BisTrack and a SaaS product like Descartes. We began envisioning a new solution that would enable the near–real-time bidirectional integration between the two as each division went live with the new ERP solution.”
Khoj reverse-engineered the existing integration solution to identify dependencies before building a proof of concept. The new approach makes the most of the iPaaS features in Azure Logic Apps to connect Epicor and Descartes. Logic Apps connectors make it easy to work with cloud-based and on-premises data, events, and resources without writing code.
US LBM’s Logistics team thoroughly tested the proof of concept. “We demonstrated to the business that the new solution worked, and it worked really fast—actually much faster than the cycle times we had seen before,” Bossert says.
Given the green light, the teams began working to connect Epicor and Descartes, calling the proposed solution the EAI platform. Now in service for more than two years, the EAI platform has reduced the end-to-end cycle time per order from 15 minutes or more to less than 2 minutes.
The success of the project led to many more integration use cases across US LBM’s IT landscape. As Bossert notes, “We built this system to integrate with Descartes and then leveraged the technology to connect our ERPs to our mobile application, giving our salespeople and customers access to up-to-the-minute logistics data that used to be available only internally. Without the Azure Integration Services layer in the middle, we wouldn’t have had this flexible solution.”
“It made sense to look at Azure Logic Apps very meaningfully because of its licensing capabilities, which are pay-as-you-go. Logic Apps doesn’t have a big barrier to entry. It is truly serverless.”
Ajay Dhingra, Founder and President, Khoj Information Technology
Building an API framework for expansion
In the initial phase of the project, the team designed the EAI platform to perform complex transformations on the order data received from the Epicor ERP systems—the sales orders, purchase orders, stock transfers, and credit notes. This data was then posted to Descartes.
However, like US LBM, the integration platform has expanded since then. Today it also uses Azure API Management to connect to multiple ERP environments and other downstream business-critical systems, such as US LBM’s mobile application.
“At the center of this serverless architecture we built are the APIs being delivered using Azure API Management. With this framework of integration, we could go from connecting Epicor, Descartes, and mobile apps to connecting any of the other applications on-premises, on Azure IaaS, or hosted on other clouds. It delivers so much business value by integrating the mobile app with real-time data integration,” Dhingra explains.
The EAI platform provides a level of abstraction that “does all the heavy lifting,” as Bossert puts it. “All those different ERP API interfaces that we have don’t become a tangled web of integrations. We can just make one connection to the EAI layer.”
Self-service is ingrained within the solution, along with the systems management console. It also supports downstream reporting and analytics for order fulfillment, providing metrics that deliver core business value.
Serving up an enterprise iPaaS architecture
The new solution is an event-driven workflow, triggered by Azure Logic Apps, that runs in near real time. Most of the data transformations and mapping are handled by Azure Functions, a serverless solution that allows developers to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs.
Data is transferred between different applications and services, and across private and public cloud environments, through the enterprise-scale message brokering services of Azure Service Bus. Other applications and services can subscribe to Azure Event Grid to be notified of changes in system state. Users benefit from single sign-on (SSO) authentication through Azure Active Directory.
As a serverless architecture, EAI is unbound by CPU and memory, and it scales horizontally and vertically as needed. That means the platform can grow along with the US LBM divisions. Each division runs its own copy with its own threads, almost as though it had its own integration solution.
In addition, the teams modernized data storage and retrieval, using Azure SQL Database to persist data for auditing purposes. To help maintain optimal end-to-end response times, Azure SQL Database dynamically scales and adjusts the degree of parallelism for Azure Logic Apps threads. The divisions that run the platform always have the computing power and parallel processing they need.
As the system integrator, Khoj has a front-row seat to the transformation at US LBM. As Ramya Nair, Director, ERP on Cloud Solutions at Khoj, explains, “This initiative came a full 180 degrees. Now all of US LBM’s data eventually goes to the mobile devices used by people within and outside of the company to get product delivery information. It gives the company a sustainable competitive advantage.”
System management at a glance
Dhingra points out another benefit of the solution—a custom system management console. The Khoj team built a friendly user interface using Azure App Service. The console brings together telemetry data from multiple sources, including Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Azure Automation, workbooks and dashboards, and cluster queries. US LBM business stakeholders can also directly upload information on the console interface and let the back end distribute it.
“Dispatchers using the console can look at a failure as it is happening, determine that an integration failed, and take corrective action immediately—without having to open a ticket with the technology team,” Dhingra says. The system also heals itself when possible. “We don’t even have to get engaged because it’s able to monitor and self-heal some of the underlying issues.”
Bossert’s team appreciates that ease of use. “Khoj stepped in and was a great partner with us. The team at Khoj developed the solution that we’re now going to use as a building block to create more functionality in the future.”
The integrator advises the integrated
As US LBM looks ahead, its cloud-first integration strategy has proven itself. Today the company can onboard entire new divisions, make code revisions to support business processes unique to each division, and thoroughly integrate and test their business systems, within 60 days. “Where it’s most impactful is the fact that the Azure Integration Services platform is driving key performance indicators that weren’t possible earlier,” Dhingra observes.
The solution has even had an impact on the lumber and building materials industry, where Epicor BisTrack is widely used. Epicor reached out to Dhingra and the team at Khoj to find out how to do what US LBM did and make it easier for its customers to connect to the popular Descartes solutions.
“We have the advantage of a very rich toolbox called Azure,” Dhingra states. “It allows us to build custom integrations very well. But it also allows us to ask what other types of integrations we can build that will add value. For us, Azure attracts customers.”
Azure Integration Services gives US LBM the flexibility it needs as the company grows. “We definitely expect scalability with a cloud solution, but it also allows us to scale more rapidly,” Bossert notes. “We fully expect to continue to grow through acquisition, so we need to have systems that allow us to have multiple connections. Azure Integration Services gives us more speed for acquisition integration, which is critical for us.”
“On the old platform, we struggled with the length and variability of our order cycle times. Azure Logic Apps gave us more stability, faster processing times, and faster cycle times.”
Michael Lombardi, Director of Logistics, US LBM
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