Mulesoft > Case Studies > Ube Industries achieves 99.98% availability for 1100 SAP interfaces with Mule ESB

Ube Industries achieves 99.98% availability for 1100 SAP interfaces with Mule ESB

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Asia

Country

Japan

Product

Mule ESB Enterprise
SAP ECC ERP system
MuleSoft Enterprise Gateway for SAP

Tech Stack

SAP ERP
Oracle
SQL Server

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Procurement

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Supply Chain Visibility

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Ube Industries is a diversified company that was founded in 1897 as a coal mining company in Ube City, Japan. The company now offers a wide range of products through more than 140 group companies, two headquarters, and multiple factories. The company operates in a complex network of internal management portals, frequently delivered via SAP, to manage data from these companies and factories across disparate production, logistics, and accounting systems. The company operates both in Japan and worldwide, and its website can be found at www.ube-ind.co.jp/english.

The Challenge

Ube Industries had adopted a commercial enterprise application integration (EAI) tool over a decade ago. However, as the volume and type of endpoints requiring integration increased dramatically over time, Ube’s legacy EAI tool could not scale to meet growing business needs. By 2013, the number of endpoints had risen to over 100 and system failures happened often. Identifying the root cause became increasingly difficult and a single bug could impact large portions of the architecture. When system downtime did occur, transactions within the affected systems ground to a halt. Recovering from these system failures required manual intervention, which increased dependency on individual skills and lengthened resolution time. With support of that EAI tool ending in January 2013, the mission critical nature of the SAP logistics and accounting systems, and business impacts associated with failed or delayed payments and distributions, Ube decided to move to a new architecture.

The Solution

Ube’s team decided to move to a new hub system that leveraged an enterprise service bus (ESB). The ESB would integrate business data between SAP ERP, Oracle, SQL Server, and over 100 homegrown and legacy applications. To minimize migration time to market and resolve issues with the stability and maintainability of their existing architecture, Ube identified that the best integration solution should meet the following criteria: Ability to develop custom functions and logic with minimal system modifications, Easy to use development tooling, Availability of development resources, Certified, out-of-the box connectivity with the SAP ECC ERP system, High availability and scalability. The result of Ube's evaluation on several candidate EAI and ESB products showed that only Mule ESB Enterprise met all five criteria. As an open source platform, MuleSoft delivers the world's largest integration developer community with over 150,000 members. The Mule Studio graphical design environment provided the Ube team with an easy on-ramp and powerful tooling for custom development. The SAP Certified MuleSoft Enterprise Gateway for SAP provided Ube with bi-directional communication to all of Ube's SAP solutions via BAPI. Through collaboration with OGIS-RI (a Japanese system integrator and preferred Mule partner), Ube's team, Ube Industries and UIS (a Japanese system integrator and a group company of Ube Industries), SAP and 100 other enterprise systems with 1100 interfaces were connected in just 3 months on Mule ESB.

Operational Impact

With Mule ESB at the core, the new architecture achieved better maintainability, availability, and stability.
System downtime associated with required changes also decreased significantly, from one hour to ten minutes per planned migration.
This improved maintainability, thus significantly reducing maintenance and operation cost.

Quantitative Benefit