Elevating Business with AI: Suzhou Universal Chain’s Journey

IBM China and Suzhou Universal Chain Technology Company recently announced the successful development of Suzhou Universal Chain’s business process automation management platform and enterprise application integration platform using IBM hybrid cloud and AI software. This was accomplished after six months of persistent work and provided the groundwork for the company’s transformation into a more technologically sophisticated and intelligent firm.

Suzhou Universal Chain is a pioneer in the local chain industry with more than 50 years of expertise in chain research and development (R&D) and production. It is also a chain R&D, manufacturing, and sales integrated national high-tech enterprise. Suzhou Universal Chain has come to understand the significance of digitization and intelligent transformation as major forces pushing its company operations in recent years. Suzhou Universal Chain has created and implemented a number of IT systems, including a manufacturing execution system (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management system (WMS), quality inspection system, and supplier management system, to support its various business processes.

Suzhou Universal Chain urgently needed to assure close coordination and interconnectivity between their upstream and downstream company processes, which comprise product design, production, logistics, sales, and more, as high-tech enterprises rapidly develop and competition heats up. In order to increase its overall efficiency, Suzhou Universal Chain had to create a uniform and modern business process management platform that enabled such integration.

Using IBM hybrid cloud and AI technologies, the following key objectives were achieved in the creation of an enterprise application integration platform and business process automation management platform.

Create communication between several systems to expedite the delivery of orders

It is frequently the case that an IT system architecture with silos results in ineffective business operations, slow order fulfillment cycles, and difficulty in promptly identifying issues. Suzhou Universal Chain’s primary concerns in its journey toward digital transformation therefore center on maximizing business value through the realization of seamless interconnectivity between IT systems used by various work roles, ensuring a smooth and efficient connection between business processes, and facilitating quick order delivery with quick alerts, end-to-end visibility, and traceability.

But in order to achieve unified management and monitoring across many application platforms, significant real-world technical issues must be solved. Some previously installed system interfaces, for instance, are too antiquated and do not comply with contemporary, widely used communication protocols, while others are rather sophisticated and use a point-to-point transmission method, resulting in significant coupling. The necessary historical codes are either lost or unreadable, and certain system interfaces are repeated and difficult to identify. It is also challenging to integrate recently released systems due to the lack of common interface standards and specifications. It is impossible to achieve interoperability and information exchange among logs because there is no single integration and there are clear information silos.

Suzhou Universal Chain used IBM Cloud Pak for Integration and its enterprise service bus component, IBM App Connect, in conjunction with the IBM Customer Success Manager team to deliver a dependable application integration solution—a light and agile application integration platform for the enterprise.

Suzhou Universal Chain’s issue with confusing system interfaces was resolved by the unified application integration platform, which was built on the enterprise service bus used by the manufacturing sector. The lightweight, agile integration architecture also enables the connection of multiple application interfaces and the processing of various data formats. Along with powerful statistical, analytical, and monitoring capabilities, the platform also offers capabilities for synchronous and asynchronous information transfer. All of these features are combined with high security, stability, and scalability.

Create communication across several systems to hasten order delivery

Suzhou Universal Chain’s digitalization and intelligent transformation go beyond only improving and integrating its IT systems as a representative industry leader in the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing sector. For the corporation to increase operational effectiveness, they think a unified and modernized business process management automation platform is essential.

Suzhou Universal Chain used to mostly rely on offline communication to carry out business processes, which resulted in communication gaps between various departments. Due to the high cost of communication from the time of purchase through delivery, it was frequently challenging to achieve delivery deadlines. The majority of production management decisions were also made based on experience, which frequently resulted in the last-minute purchase of raw materials, posing dangers to cost control and delaying the tracking of procurement progress. Suzhou Universal Chain also lacked systems in place to deal with exceptional circumstances as well as real-time input on the progress of order placing, production, and delivery.

Suzhou Universal Chain adopted the Business Automation Workflow (BAW) capabilities in IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation as an enterprise-level solution to integrate their business systems and manage process approvals with complete visibility of their business processes. This was done with the help of the IBM Customer Success Manager team.

With its advantages in process management and business rules management, IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation offers an integrated and coordinated software platform for process improvement and BAW lifecycle management. Customers are also able to create the workflow and visualization process platform they require thanks to its stability and high performance, both of which are necessary for essential task solutions.

Along with BAW, IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation also includes intelligent automation tools like document management and rules engines, which can be quickly expanded horizontally in the future to serve more clients’ intelligent automation requirements.

Suzhou Universal Chain is now building a unified platform for business process automation management using IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation. The platform features a very easy development interface, allowing the IT staff of the company to quickly create new business processes in accordance with fresh business demands. Additionally, deployment is simple, debugging is convenient and quick, and development is speedy.

Suzhou Universal Chain’s requirements for a streamlined rules engine were satisfied by the developed procedures, which can be simply connected with other systems and have a built-in content and rules engine. Additionally, the platform provides thorough process visualization from a technological standpoint, allowing for efficient management of complicated internal processes and process compliance monitoring.

The platform, which is based on Red Hat OpenShift’s hybrid cloud architecture, enables users to quickly move between several underlying infrastructures, making it easier for Suzhou Universal Chain to manage its applications, data, and business processes in a hybrid IT environment.

General Manager of Suzhou Universal Chain Ms. Huang Yadan stated, “Over the last six months, with the assistance of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration and IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, we have successfully streamlined various links and systems in our order-to-delivery process and achieved seamless integration and support for our business through interconnected IT systems. Through a series of modernization workshops, the IBM Customer Success Manager team also provided our IT team with practical skills and promoted a cooperative, win-win environment. We are anticipating success exactly like this.

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A hybrid integration platform called IBM Cloud Pak for Integration uses closed-loop AI automation to accommodate various integration models. To integrate apps and data across any cloud or on-premises environment, the platform offers a complete range of integration capabilities inside a single, unified experience.