International Paper Case Study

Background
With approximately 9 million acres of land managed in the United States alone, International Paper (IP) is one of the world's largest private landowners and operates according to the American Forest & Paper Association Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

IP has significant global businesses in paper and paper distribution, packaging and forest products, including building materials. The company has operations in nearly 40 countries, employs more than 90,000 people and exports its products to more than 120 countries. Sales of almost $25 billion annually are derived from businesses located primarily in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia/Pacific and Canada.

Challenge
Understanding the value of integrating with buyers and suppliers, International Paper was about to embark on the implementation of a business-to-business integration strategy that would ultimately electronically connect the company to thousands of business partners. A recognized leader in electronic commerce, IP envisioned a future when trading partners would be connected in real-time to a single infrastructure leveraging common standards.

Leaders at IP knew that real-time communication would enhance the company's relationships with business partners. They believed that customers would benefit from easier and more automated transactions, fewer errors, and more readily accessible information, ultimately creating more satisfied, more loyal customers for IP.

IP's technical and business leaders realized that making this vision a reality would take a series of affordable, achievable steps. The current state - a complex EDI infrastructure and application architecture that had grown through multiple acquisitions, plus trading partners transacting in dozens of formats - would need to evolve in a manageable way.

Solution
Implementing the Liaison Integration solution gave International Paper line-of-sight to its targeted future state, plus short-term cost savings and infrastructure simplification.

Jointly developing a plan to migrate to a single XML connection to the Liaison network, IP and Liaison first focused on consolidating EDI transactions to one network. Grouping trading partners into sets, all EDI traffic was migrated to Liaison from the multiple Value Added Networks previously used for EDI. The result was lower overall costs - in support overhead and transaction fees.

Having established a single connection to the Liaison network, IP has created a path to migrate toward a robust real-time messaging infrastructure. As IP continues to deliver XML messaging capabilities for its electronic trading relationships, it can leverage this single connection to reach virtually any trading partner. Further, IP increases messaging efficiency by reusing standard formats - messages are built once, then leveraged for as many trading relationships as possible.

Results
"We knew we had a long way to go to reach our goal of a single real-time infrastructure," commented Steve Breaux, Director of Enterprise Architecture, International Paper, "but we thought Liaison was a logical place to start. We liked the concept of a single connection point - it just makes it simpler and less costly to reach our diverse trading partners. We can use this one connection to communicate with just about everyone, whether a supplier or a buyer who uses an e-commerce application. We're looking forward to working with Liaison to reach our future state."