Cords Cords Cords Cords
Customer Q & A | ERP Integrations

Customer Q & A: Sunkist

The ongoing Customer Q & A blog series highlights a wide range of Jitterbit customers to find out what business needs drove their integration requirements and why they made Jitterbit their integration solution of choice.

In this week’s hot seat is Alan Kenworthy, Director of IT at Sunkist Growers.
Read the Customer Success Story

About Sunkist

Sunkist is a leading international supplier of  fresh fruit, and the oldest operating citrus cooperative in America, owned by thousands of citrus growers across California and Arizona.

How did you find out about Jitterbit and what were some of the reasons you chose it as your integration solution?

Prior to joining Sunkist I worked for another large producer of fresh fruits and vegetables. I spent a number of years there doing detailed work on integrating various applications. Sunkist really needed an integration solution to replace the many programs and scripts they had connecting Oracle Financials with Kirkey (Sales & Distribution). The impetus for the move was the adoption of Microsoft Navision for Financials, so we set about installing and bench testing various solutions that were on the market. This included hands on proof of concepts of six direct competitors of Jitterbit’s. We chose Jitterbit because it really hit the sweet spot for highly evolved functionality while being easy to adopt (training) and support (ease of use). The process flow engine is fully integrated as part of the configuration environment and the included data mapper is very versatile and has a great rules engine for building functions. This is a very polished suite of tools. One of the final evaluation comments for Jitterbit was that “it all just works”.

How do you currently use Jitterbit?

We are currently using Jitterbit to integrate our AS400-based Sales system (Kirkey) with Microsoft Navision as well as provide an interface to Kirkey with one of our outside vendors.

The move to Navision is letting us leverage web services in our interfaces. Jitterbit makes the process really easy and extremely quick to setup and run. This allows us to use Navision’s own business rules as part of the integration as we trigger web service functions thru Jitterbit. The beauty of this is not having to code those rules in the interface, leaving Jitterbit to manage rules required to get the external data into the form Navision needs. We’ve thus been able to isolate our interfaces from Navision’s backend tables/data structures, greatly reducing the impact of any changes made in the future.

Jitterbit is managing the conversation between Kirkey and Navision, handling data delivery, transformation and processing. Error handling takes advantage of Jitterbit’s ability to turn its processes into web services. So we call the exact same process when an error is fixed as the process used in the normal production flow. Jitterbit has made the whole process really simple for us.

From a business perspective, how has Jitterbit helped you?

Outside of the obvious benefits of having our applications integrated and key business processes automated, the real benefit has been the ability to eliminate difficult-to-manage code and replace it with a very easy to use and manage suite of tools.

We were able to get Jitterbit up and test interfaces running in just a matter of days and there is really only one person responsible for managing our integration. When we did have questions, the Jitterbit support team was always extremely helpful.

Jitterbit supports our core functional needs in a cost effective suite that is easy to use and always just works. Jitterbit does what it is intended to do and in a very powerful way, yet is so easy to deploy that Sunkist was able to get its new applications integrated with very few (one!) resources, very quickly. We plan to expand our use of Jitterbit as it is our standard tool for integration at Sunkist.

Thanks Alan! If you want to learn more about Sunkist’s integration, be sure to check out their Customer Success Story.

Do you have a Jitterbit success story you would like to share? Drop us a line at customersuccess [at] jitterbit.com or @jitterbit on twitter.

Have questions? We are here to help.

Contact Us