This dual-scenario proved true for Philips, one of the world’s most recognised manufacturers of healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle products. At Philips, making data generated by its 116,000 employees in more than 60 countries readily accessible, easily useable and quickly actionable by the rest of the organisation has been a strategic intent for many years.

It’s no surprise that the company’s motto, which rang true when the company was founded over 120 years ago as it still does today, is to provide ‘sense and simplicity’ to its users.

Every cog is vital
Being such a large company Philips creates and manages data on a massive scale, moving it between numerous divisions and across multiple departments and applications.

In its Healthcare division alone more than 60,000 business messages are generated every day in different parts of the organisation. For example, when a new MRI system is sold and an order created, it sets off a chain of messages that impacts many departments. This could include the sales team specifying the order, the manufacturing team tasked to build the system, the buying team required to source the components, the finance team to issue and invoice the customer, the project management team to ensure the MRI system is delivered and installed at the customer’s site, and so on.

It takes just one cog in the data-mapping machine to slip for problems to surface, problems that ultimately impact overall process efficiency and operating profit. As a result, ensuring that data is accurately mapped between all departments at Philips is a big priority.

Data mapping challenges
Philips Healthcare had initially been using a TIBCO-based enterprise application infrastructure (EAI) as the backbone for its business. After more than 10 years, new middleware requirements and unsupported TIBCO software forced Philips Healthcare to take action. To address this, Philips upgraded to a newer TIBCO platform, together with a new canonical model to enforce a single XML-based structure for its data. However, with the new TIBCO platform, Philips found challenges in its existing way of developing data-mapping that needed to be resolved.

Hans Sloots, EAI Consultant for Philips’ Healthcare division, explains: “After upgrading to an XML environment, we found that our process of mapping, writing a mapping specification in Excel and then coding it, was not good enough. We often found that mapping specifications and mapping coding were not in sync. We needed a new solution that could not only better define our maps, but could remain flexible enough to transfer them to new middleware platforms as and when they are introduced.”

Transforming data with Contivo®
The team’s search quickly led them to Contivo, a data transformation and integration tool from Liaison Technologies.

Unlike most other mapping solutions, Liaison applies artificial intelligence to the mapping process which means it can, based on any situation, automatically suggest the best mapping option available. This drastically cuts down on the time previously required to complete error-free mapping manually.

Today, the Philips Healthcare team uses Contivo licenses across a series of data centres located all over the world. With over 150 mapping templates currently in production, it has a reliable framework to ensure every message reaches the right department at the right time, and in a format that can be easily interpreted and applied. With Contivo, any new maps or adjustments to existing maps can now be quickly delivered.

Painless migration to SAP PI
The broader adaptability of Liaison Contivo was soon put to the test as Philips decided to harmonise its middleware platforms and move from its TIBCO environment to a SAP PI. This was already being used in the company’s lighting and lifestyle departments, and with efficiency in mind, the company was looking to consolidate onto a single middleware platform.

Using the maps already put into place, Liaison was able to easily transform mappings over to the new SAP PI environment, meaning the switch could be carried out without any noticeable disruption to business processes.

Mapping data in hours, not days
Having completed this migration, the Philips Healthcare team was then supposed to transition to a mapping solution that was included as part of the SAP PI package.

However, while this new mapping tool had many qualities, its manual nature presented a problem. It relied on a third-party overseas to do the map development, which meant it could not match the speed with which the Healthcare team could create maps with Contivo. The difference here could sometimes be hours versus days. Also, since the actual mapping was being done by a third-party based on a specification written in Excel, the final result wasn’t always exactly what was required, potentially requiring further cycles of specification change and development.

Sloots explained the Healthcare team’s decision to stick with Contivo. “It was all down to the efficiency advantage and, based on our experience, Contivo has paid for itself many times over.”

By using Contivo as the bedrock of data mapping within the Philips Healthcare division, staff can operate at the speed their business requires without having to wait for data mapping to catch up. This keeps the business competitive and drives efficiency across the organisation, all of which contribute to the bottom line. Most of all, it reflects the company’s vision of using ‘sense and simplicity’ to get the job done.

Sloots concluded: “Contivo has helped deliver the agility that our business needs, from data mapping to data migration. It’s integral to our success.”

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