Curvature Accelerates Quote to Cash Operations and Saves 1,000+ Hours a Year

Jitterbit’s iPaaS reaps enormous time savings and other benefits for a technology reseller’s IT group.

Challenge

Outdated data integration technology slows processes and creates headaches

Curvature, a Park Place Technologies company, is the global leading provider of new and preowned IT hardware, IT support, and maintenance services. Founded over three decades ago, the company maintains offices in 12 countries worldwide and operation centers in the United States, the Netherlands, and Singapore. Curvature’s state-of-the-art testing facilities differentiates them from the competition; ensuring their customers receive quality goods, assembled to order, and delivered on time.

To keep up with customer demand and meet internal service level agreements (SLAs), Curvature needed to push data across systems in its quote to cash cycle quickly and efficiently. However, its IBM Cast Iron integration technology was outdated, unwieldy, and prone to error.

“We were on a legacy system that was no longer supported and also couldn’t support the Oracle upgrade we were about to undertake,” says Kyle Anixter, Hardware IT Director for Curvature. “That was coupled with a lack of visibility — we couldn’t see transactions and payloads quickly to diagnose issues. We needed greater ease of use and we needed to be able to move faster with whatever tool we used.”

Simply keeping the system up and running required a significant amount of daily effort.

“I was spending up to 20 hours a week in addition to my day job after hours, handholding, restarting the system, and doing what I needed to do to keep the integrations working,” says Tina Pfaff, Senior Manager of Application Development for Curvature.

Solution

Jitterbit’s scalable iPaaS solution enables seamless integration

After assessing numerous integration solutions, Curvature chose Jitterbit’s iPaaS solution, Harmony. “Harmony is the right combination for us in terms of features and price”, says Pfaff. “With Jitterbit, we get a fully functional middleware platform at a price point that makes sense for the size of our business.”

Working within a tight timeline, Curvature deployed Harmony and integrated its business-critical applications, including Salesforce and Oracle systems.

“We had essentially two months to do development and testing,” says Anixter. “So it was pretty quick in terms of moving the number of integrations we had. But we were able to actually take the time to put it all together in a much better way while also meeting the project deadline. Working together, the Jitterbit and Curvature teams were able move the solution onto the platform, and found time to optimize many of the integrations — in turn, the project was not just a ‘lift and shift’ but provided new scalability and automation.”

Outcome

Quotes in half the time, a foundation for further growth, and a happier IT team

Jitterbit’s Harmony iPaaS implementation has delivered dramatic results for Curvature. The company generates quotes in just half the previous time and has reduced data processing errors by 95 percent.

With the Jitterbit technology deployed, Curvature can move forward with additional IT initiatives. “Our Jitterbit implementation lays the groundwork for our future goals,” Anixter said. “Having an up-to-date middleware solution in place that integrates applications seamlessly and in a scalable way will allow us to keep up with our growing demand and continue to deliver a quality product to our customers. We have additional optimization efforts on the horizon – with Jitterbit, we can more seamlessly expand existing integrations and consider new ones.”

The solution has proven to be instrumental for lightening the load on Curvature’s IT team. Plus, with Jitterbit University’s online training system, the rest of Curvature’s IT team was able to get up to speed on the platform quickly and easily.

“An integration should be something that just runs. That’s what this implementation has done for us. I don’t sit and watch my phone after 5:00pm to make sure nothing’s broken. My kids actually requested a party celebrating the demise of the previous system. ‘Jitterbit’ is a good word in my house.”
-Tina Pfaff, Senior Manager of Application Development, Curvature