Workflow One: Print and marketing fulfillment

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

WorkflowOne is one of the nation's largest and fastest growing providers of print and promotional products and supply chain management services. They produce, store and distribute hundreds of millions of pieces of material each year for clients in a wide range of industries. WorkflowOne uses the Ingres database as the core of one of their central operational systems.

THEIR MISSION

The business of Workflow One is to help clients manage their brand-related spend - that is, the internal forms and documents that run their business and the external promotional material with which they communicate to their customers. This includes everything business forms, checks and labels to 401K statements, direct mail programs and sales collateral. By ensuring that their clients' brand image is portrayed consistent and by controlling their spend through efficient purchasing and order management, Workflow One helps their customer improve their own business in measurable ways.

At the core of WorkflowOne's mission is the delivery of exceptional customer service. As a business process outsourcer, WorkflowOne is entrusted with the efficient implementation of key portions of their clients' mission-critical processes. If WorkflowOne cannot deliver, their customers suffer directly and will quickly look for other alternative suppliers.

For this reason, WorkflowOne demands reliability and performance, and they depend on Ingres technology to provide these all-important qualities.

Their System

In order to provide greater efficiency and hands-on service, WorkflowOne has distribution centers across the country. The company uses a resource planning package that controls the movement of inventory within and between these warehouses. The system is built on an Ingres database.

The system is responsible for helping WorkflowOne manage over $450 million dollars of business.

Their Architecture

WorkflowOne has designed their resource planning system so that each of their 30 distribution sites across the U.S. is supported by its own Ingres database. Consequently, each individual customer requisition may access one or more Ingres databases in order to assemble the overall customer order.

The architecture of WorkflowOne's system uses an enormous amount of replication between the databases to track the movement of product inventory. In effect, the system has 81 master databases, all replicating to the other databases. This replication allows WorkflowOne to fill orders more quickly, even when pulling inventory stored in different warehouses, while ensuring greater privacy of individual customer account data.

Their Standard

The WorkflowOne system presents significant scalability and reliability challenges. The company has depended on Ingres as their production database for more than 10 years, with highly successful results.

Kevin Morrison, senior director of IT Corporate Services at WorkflowOne, is confident in the ability of Ingres to handle their critical demands. "Because our clients trust us to manage key business processes for them, this is the most service oriented company I have ever been associated with," said Morrison. "We cannot deliver the outstanding service we require without rock-solid systems. The Ingres database has provided unparalleled flexibility for our company over the past 15 years as we have grown from $200 million in revenue to over a billion."