LONDON (September 12, 2007)  R Twinings & Company Ltd. has picked SEEBURGER UK’s Business Integration Server (BIS) to deliver a complete Business-to-Business (B2B) integration solution. BIS is now delivering a reliable and flexible solution, allowing Twinings to trade electronically with all its key UK customers, from smaller independent concerns to the major supermarkets.

For more than 300 years, Twinings has been a world leader in the blending, packaging and provision of tea. The company produces more than 400 different tea blends and markets them in 115 countries across the globe.

Twinings had been running an EDI system for more than ten years but, as Business Systems Analyst and Developer, Graham Dickaty, explains, this system could no longer satisfactorily support the organization’s demands. “The reliability of the old system was a real issue. We decided we needed to invest in a new integration solution that would be much more stable and, as well as providing everything the old system did,  would allow us to trade electronically with more of our partners, including suppliers, distributors and international customers.”

Twinings carried out a painstaking search of potential solutions and ultimately decided to adopt SEEBURGER’s BIS solution. “BIS is exactly what we were looking for. It gives us the power and flexibility to handle all of our current e-commerce requirements as well as enabling us to meet future demands. It covers everything we are currently doing, including ad hoc integration requests, as well as everything we are planning to do in the business integration realm, and brings them all into a single e-business solution. It also extends our capabilities beyond simply EDI and allows us to easily handle all communications with our business partners. For example, we have external warehouse and logistics providers, and they can communicate directly with our warehouse management and ERP systems thanks to the BIS integration tools.”

Having implemented BIS, Twinings are finding it can also deliver additional business benefits throughout the organization. “We have already developed a number of solutions that have delivered tangible benefits to the company. For example, the customer service department is benefiting from instant email notifications of orders received, as well as having access to real-time order information. This improved visibility significantly enhances our customer service capability, improving relationships with our customers and increasing their general satisfaction and loyalty,” says Graham Dickaty.

He concludes, “BIS has given us a hugely reliable, easily manageable and very flexible solution. It has helped us improve the accuracy and reliability of our B2B trading, as well as delivering enhanced visibility of internal business processes and operations. In addition, the consultants at SEEBURGER have proven to be very helpful and responsive to our needs and have been a major contributor to the overall success of the project. Twinings management have quickly seen the benefits of the system and are increasingly requesting new ways to exploit it. We have found that with BIS, the only limitation on what it can do is our imagination.”

SEEBURGER is a leading provider of global business integration solutions designed to optimize transactions throughout the extended enterprise by automating trading relationships with all partners regardless of their size and technical resources.  Launched in 1986 to provide integration solutions to the automotive industry in Germany, the company today is ranked among the top business-to-business gateway providers by industry analysts, and serves more than 7,000 customers in 50 countries and more than 15 industries through its flagship B2B Gateway and related products and services.  SEEBURGER has global offices in Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, including a U.S. office that opened in 1998.