Mechanisation

Jumbo built a new, heavily automated distribution centre in Nieuwegein. Mechanisation was the integration project underneath it: the ESB and IBM Integration Bus interfaces that let the automation in the building talk to everything else the business runs on.

The shape of the problem

A mechanised DC is not one system. Goods movement, picking, stock positions, orders and master data live in different places, some inside Jumbo and some outside it, and the automation only works if all of them agree. The integration layer is where that agreement is negotiated, in both directions, continuously, while the building is running.

The interfaces connected the automation to internal and external systems including Locus, Pocus and APSSC, and to SAP on both generations that were live during the programme, ECC and S/4HANA. Running against two SAP generations at once is its own constraint: the same business process has to be expressed twice, and the integration layer is what absorbs the difference so the systems on either side do not have to care.

What the work was

Designing and building those interfaces on IBM Integration Bus and App Connect Enterprise, then operating them. In a distribution centre, integration is not a delivery that ends at go-live. The interfaces are load-bearing: when a flow stops, the building stops, and the failure shows up as pallets not moving rather than as an error in a log somewhere. That shapes how they have to be built, with explicit failure modes and enough observability to tell, quickly, which of a dozen systems is the one actually at fault.