Dairubicon

Supply Chain Delivery Solution in the Amazon EC2 Cloud

Highlights

DAI Rubicon offer innovation solutions around print, distribution and circulation management for the publishing industry. To improve the experience of customer invoicing, DAI Rubicon chose the Ingres database and a mixture of Jboss platforms and frameworks for their open source supply chain delivery solution, hosted in the Amazon EC2 cloud. DAI Rubicon expect to save $150,000 - $200,000 per year in operation expenditure savings through reduced infrastructure, reduced licensing costs, improved automation and faster scalability.

Challenge

DAI Rubicon provides publishers an end to end solution including print, distribution and circulation management. “DAI Rubicon is in a high volume, low margin business. We pass on bulk discounts and have very complex pricing schedules for customers and partners.” Said Rob Turner, Managing Director of DAI Rubicon. “To enhance our ordering experience we needed to find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases. We decided to add a point of sale supply chain delivery solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable and easier to manage without adding to the cost.”

Base2Services, Australia’s leading open source cloud computing specialist was chosen to build the supply chain delivery solution. “We chose Base2Services because they offered a more scalable, more transparent, and easy to use solution built on the Amazon EC2 cloud that would lower our ongoing operational costs.”

Solution

DAI Rubicon’s supply chain delivery solution makes ordering easier for customers. There is greater transparency in the process which means the customer has better visibility of where their order is. The supply chain delivery solution consolidated and automated DAI Rubicon’s online ordering processes. “We have built into the solution the ability to identify bottlenecks for better automation processes”. Said Arthur Marinis, CEO of Base2Services.

Base2Services tested and deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. “Using the EC2 cloud means customers only pay for what they use, and it can scale in a matter of minutes.” Said Marinis. “This is important because before launch, you don’t know what the hit rate will be, and using the cloud provides the ability to scale depending on demand rather than paying for additional services not being used, or reaching capacity and not being able to cope.”

The solution was 100% open source including the Ingres database, JBoss, JBPM and DROOLS. “Choosing mature open source software is dramatically less costly than using proprietary vendors. We get access to the source code to better identify any issues, and of course we build with open standards to ensure our customers never get caught up with proprietary lock-in.” Said Marinis. “It is more cost effective and lowers the implementation and ongoing costs.”

“Base2Services have built a solution that will dramatically lower our ongoing operational costs.” Said Turner. “We now have better processes, better integration with our providers, lower infrastructure costs, lower support costs, lower licensing costs, and need less people to maintain the solution.”

Results

• Easy to use supply chain delivery solution improves customer invoicing
• More automation means less IT support to maintain. Ability to identify and solve bottlenecks in the system
• 100% Open Source Solution including Ingres and a mixture of JBoss platforms and frameworks
• Variable infrastructure cost ensures ability to scale quickly with Amazon EC2
• Lower ongoing costs. Expected $150,000 $200,000 per year in operational expenditure savings