Customer success story
Print on demand, from order to invoice, with nobody typing
Berling Media prints books when customers order them. The books flowed from the web shop to the printer automatically; the invoice did not. Rapidi connected Microsoft Dynamics AX to Publit in six weeks, on budget, and closed the last manual gap in the process.
Berling Media AB is a Stockholm publisher. It uses Publit, a Swedish print-on-demand service, so a book is printed only once someone has bought it. Orders reached Publit automatically, but reporting back into Dynamics AX and invoicing the customer was manual, time-consuming and error-prone. Rapidi built the missing link with Berling’s AX partner Accigo. This is the company’s second Rapidi project; the first connected Salesforce to Dynamics AX and still runs.
Talk to an integration expert
An industry that keeps being disrupted
Desktop publishing, e-books, Amazon: book publishing has absorbed one disruption after another over the past few decades. Berling Media has used technology to keep adapting rather than to hold the line.
The company publishes for education, health and religion — books, magazines and websites — under brands including Verbum, Gleerups and Gothia. More about the company at berlingmedia.se.
Bertil Palmqvist was responsible for Microsoft Dynamics AX and integrations at the company, which in a publishing house means keeping the systems in step with how people actually buy books now.
Digitalization has completely transformed our industry. Today more than ever before, we need to be responsive, effective and offer our customers the best digital experience.
Print on demand is one of the answers. Nothing is printed until somebody orders it, which removes the warehouse full of unsold stock that traditionally sat between a publisher and its risk. Berling Media uses Publit for the physical printing.
The missing link
Publit itself worked well. “It works seamlessly and allows us to support our print-on-demand strategy,” Palmqvist says. “The books are ordered via our web shops and, in an automated process, are transferred to Publit that prints the books and sends them to the customer.”
Then the automation stopped. “The only thing we were missing was an integration that would automatically report back to our ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and invoice the customer.”
Until that gap closed, staff keyed order information into AX by hand. Palmqvist is blunt about what that costs: it was “quite time-consuming and error-prone”. A print-on-demand model that still needs a person to retype every order is only half a print-on-demand model.
Why Rapidi, the first time
Palmqvist already knew Rapidi, having been a customer for more than five years. That relationship started with a different problem: connecting Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics AX.
The obvious answer at the time was Microsoft BizTalk Server, and he did not want it. “I have to admit that I was not entirely keen on using BizTalk Server as the platform for this integration. We had just come out of a long, expensive and somewhat painful integration project using BizTalk Server for our warehousing system.” He asked his Salesforce partner for advice instead, and they recommended Rapidi.
“I could tell that Rapidi had much more experience with integrations towards Salesforce,” he says. “Rapidi has deep knowledge about both Salesforce and the Microsoft Dynamics products, which allows them to provide thorough and tight integration solutions between these systems. This was just what I was looking for. It was also a more affordable solution.” That first project landed on time and on budget, and it still updates Salesforce with customer data from AX today.
How the second project started
This part is worth recording precisely because it was not a sales process.
Rapidi runs regular calls with customers after implementation, to check the integration is still earning its keep. “During one of these calls, I happened to mention that I was looking for a solution to integrate Microsoft Dynamics AX with Publit,” Palmqvist says. “I knew Rapidi’s strong solution for Salesforce integrations, but was not aware that the platform could also support other types of integrations.”
He knew the solution was simple and robust, and he wanted to work with the same team again. Berling Media went ahead.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Six pages: the print-on-demand model, the BizTalk project that put Palmqvist off, the six weeks it took to join AX and Publit, and why he came back to Rapidi a second time. Yours after one short form.
The result
Rapidi worked alongside Accigo, Berling Media’s Microsoft Dynamics AX partner, to identify what was actually needed and build it. Integrating AX with Publit took six weeks, within scope and on the original budget. The print-on-demand process now runs from order to invoice with no manual work in it.
Having a reliable integration platform allows us to get the full benefit of our investment in the Publit solution, because it allows us to extend the automation of our business processes to include the invoicing process as well.
Palmqvist splits the value in two. “Firstly, they have developed a strong technical platform that makes integration easy. Although it does provide a standard, out-of-the-box integration between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, it is not reduced to it. It is made so that additional integration end-points can easily be created.”
“Secondly, I am in no doubt that the success behind my Rapidi projects is based on the deep knowledge, understanding and expertise of their teams. They excel at the art of developing a simple solution for even complex integration challenges. And this also means that they were able to understand our exact needs and precisely estimate the effort to develop the integration. And in the end, they delivered according to their promises. They were open and straightforward, letting us know of any problems, so that we always felt that we had the situation under control.”
Print on demand keeps growing as a share of the business, and he expects that to continue. The integration has run smoothly since it went in.
Automated everything except the invoice?
Tell us where your process stops being automatic and which systems sit on either side, and we will tell you whether a standard Rapidi template covers you.