REDMOND, Wash., May 30, 2002 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that London Drugs Ltd., a leading retail chain in Canada with 55 stores throughout Alberta and British Columbia, chose to further enhance its supply chain solution by using Microsoft® BizTalk®
Server for the enterprise application integration (EAI) infrastructure of the solution. As a result of the success of this supply chain project, London Drugs is standardizing on BizTalk Server, using it for future EAI projects as well as to add a B2B component to its supply chain.
With BizTalk Server, London Drugs has been able to create a more flexible architecture for integrating internal applications and has connected seven best-of-breed applications that handle everything from the supply chain to human resources. This has enabled the company to more easily add or change applications and business processes without spending as much time hard-coding application-to-application connections and processes as it did in the past. In addition, the EAI solution based on BizTalk Server has given London Drugs increased visibility into its supply chain, enabling easier problem identification and resolution. The company has reduced overall process cycle time and has saved a large amount of manpower in application integration that now can be applied to other pressing issues.
“BizTalk Server offered London Drugs a strategic, flexible and scalable solution that fit our EAI needs perfectly,” said Nick Curalli, general manager of IT at London Drugs. “We were spending too much time hard-coding the integration between our many best-of-breed applications, including our mission-critical supply chain solution, and we knew that with the right integration product we could save ourselves quite a bit of time and money while improving our organizational agility to respond to change, which is a key driver of our corporate success. BizTalk Server was the right choice, and the benefits have been significant.”
“London Drugs has a great vision for how it wants its supply chain to perform and was able to make its vision a reality using BizTalk Server,” said Dave Wascha, lead product manager for BizTalk Server at Microsoft. “The integration London Drugs achieved is a good example of how companies can improve productivity and corporate agility by reducing hard-coded integration and therefore lower costs using BizTalk Server.”
Using XML, SOAP and other core Internet transports and protocols, BizTalk Server unites EAI, B2B and business process management technology in a single product to allow companies to easily orchestrate Web services and rapidly build dynamic business processes that span applications, platforms and businesses.
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