Case Study:
Hunter Douglas

Short Summary

To manage a complex integration of their Salesforce and SAP ERP systems, Hunter Douglas chose Advantco, whose expertise translated to real ROI, as Hunter Douglas estimated that they saved 1300 hours in development time and tens of thousands of dollars.

About

Hunter Douglas is the world’s leading manufacturer of window coverings as well as a major manufacturer of architectural products. Hunter Douglas develops innovative, high-quality, proprietary products that can be found in millions of homes and commercial buildings around the globe.

With nearly 23,000 employees in 100 countries, Hunter Douglas faced a difficult task with their CRM and ERP integration. In the end, they chose to invest in a solution that would integrate their CRM (Salesforce) and ERP (SAP) systems and maintain their custom environments. This would simplify processes and make it easier to support. The Hunter Douglas team knew that proper integration of these systems was necessary to streamline business operations and better serve customers.

The Challenge

Hunter Douglas wanted to make their CRM and ERP systems more efficient and self-supporting while maintaining their own custom developments. With maintenance and support already an issue that slowed down development, any further downtime could cost the business more time and money. They had the added challenge of needing to integrate cloud-based S4HANA with three other 3rd party systems and SAP BI Analytics. To address this complex integration, Hunter Douglas needed a development partner with deep technical integration expertise and a solution to cut down on manual efforts.

The Solution

This is why Hunter Douglas chose Advantco and the Advantco SFDC Adapter. Advantco is an SAP Certified Partner and global technology firm providing SAP NetWeaver® integration solutions, consulting services, and custom development.

With Advantco on board and the SFDC Adapter in place, the Hunter Douglas team quickly discovered that Advantco offered unparalleled integration solutions and support. The SFDC Adapter gave a way to easily handle session management and provided schema generation for both SOAP & REST API, cutting down efforts significantly. Hunter Douglas appreciated that the Adapter supported attachments, streaming API, and monitoring and logging of messages. The Team relies heavily on the Bulk API support to restrict the records per message and automatically switch if the daily Salesforce threshold is exceeded.

Results

An integration this complex takes a large development effort when the traditional SOAP adapter is used. Leveraging Advantco’s SFDC Adapter helped Hunter Douglas reduce development time and costs substantially. Integrations were simplified, and the overall performance of business-critical interfaces improved.

Key results include:

• Smooth and robust integration of CRM and ERP applications
• No Salesforce dependency delays
• Easy to support and maintain the interfaces.
• Reduced development effort – Hunter Douglas saved an estimated 1300 hours in potential consultant fees and development hours with Advantco.

“At Hunter Douglas, we wanted to achieve a smooth and robust integration. At the same time, we needed to develop the integration with our current sprint. Our main challenge was to build the interfaces into a new PI system from the scratch. Using Advantco, we were able to achieve this without a lot of development effort. The solution is very robust to handle REST, BULK, and traditional XML-based integration using APEX callouts. The SFDC Workbench features, XSD generation and response structure generation, are very useful and easy. The Advantco support team is very knowledgeable and can resolve any issue very quickly. I give Advantco support 5 stars as well! I would definitely recommend Advantco for SAP-SFDC integration.” said Sugata Majumdar - Application Architect, Hunter Douglas