Leading Provider of Gas Processing and Petrochemicals
Ensures Consistency of Information Across Processes
and Systems Using Integration Platform Based on
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
The SIBUR Group is headquartered in Moscow, but its gas processing and petrochemical
operations have a global reach. With more than 25,000 employees, SIBUR operates 26
production sites with over 1,400 large customers in the energy, automotive, construction,
fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), chemical, and other industries in approximately 75
countries worldwide.
Working in a complex, high-risk industry means that content management is critical for
enabling effective processes and operations throughout the organization. Adding to the
complexity is the need to ensure the consistency of information for business processes that
extend across different subsidiaries and a range of computer systems.
To address this demand, SIBUR Group turned to CROC, a WSO2 partner that leads the
Russian systems integration market and is one of the 10 largest IT companies in Russia.
Today, SIBUR and a growing number of its subsidiaries use the enterprise content
management (ECM) system created and implemented by CROC. Developed as part of the
project, an open source integration platform enables the integrity of system directories and
the interaction with several installations and various types of enterprise resource planning
(ERP) systems. The fact that the integration is based on WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
(WSO2 ESB) has allowed the customer both to leverage the industrial solution’s scalability
and functionality and reduce licensing costs.
Through the deployment of the unified ECM system and integration platform, SIBUR has
accelerated the approval and search of documents, reduced document printing and storage
costs, and increased both the staff performance and the transparency of its business
processes.
Low Cost Meets High Performance With WSO2 ESB
SIBUR has Russia's largest and most extensive integrated infrastructure for the processing
and transportation of associated petroleum gas and natural gas liquids. To support these
operations, the company has subsidiaries located across many regions of the country.
While SIBUR has had document management in place for many years, the enterprise
resource planning was not centralized well enough. Therefore, the company sought a
more effective way to deliver and store information across corporate headquarters and
its subsidiaries on a centralized basis. This led to the decision to implement a unified ECM
system in the Group that would allow for the management of organizational and regulatory
documents and contracts, as well as the storage of primary financial, legal, and investment
documentation. Additionally, the implemented tool would be integrated with the company's
key business applications.
"SIBUR is an established leader in the industry
with a network of information systems across
the country. Document information plays a key
role, so it is important that these systems all
work together reliably and securely," explained
Pavel Klepinin, CIO at SIBUR.
CROC determined that the best approach for
the integration of applications across SIBUR
Group would be a service-oriented architecture
(SOA), where an ESB integration platform
would serve as the backbone for handling all
mediation and transformation of services.
"We already had
previous experience
working with WSO2
integration solutions,
which proved both their
cost-effectiveness and
high-performance."
Alexey Smirnov,
Head of Integration Solutions Practice,
CROC
Alexey Smirnov, head of the integration solutions practice at CROC, remarked, "The
integration platform deployment had to meet the following requirements: a low license
cost, flexibility, scalability, and rich functionality. We already had previous experience
working with WSO2 integration solutions, which proved both their cost-effectiveness and
high-performance, so the choice was easy."
With these requirements in mind, open source software products quickly rose to the short
list of solutions to consider. Ultimately, WSO2 ESB was chosen to serve as the core of the
integration platform along with Apache ActiveMQ as the messaging engine.
WSO2 ESB's Open Architecture Facilitates
Implementation
The integration project was a complex one, but WSO2 ESB's integration capabilities and
support for open standards helped to facilitate the implementation. For example, the
adapters developed under the project for the bank-client applications support tens of
banking document formats and enable flexible setup in order to connect new banks.
Further complicating the integration platform project was an ERP system replacement
project that was running in parallel at SIBUR.
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus handles mediation and transformation within the SIBUR
integration platform
"Most of the information systems use their own data formats, so we had to create a lot of
adapters to support transformation between the different systems we were integrating
and the ESB format. In addition to the building of the adaptors, we also had to support the
transparent integration with two different ERP platforms," noted Alexey Smirnov.
Increased Consistency and Efficiency
Today, the SIBUR integration platform relies on WSO2 ESB to handle mediation and
transformation. Within the platform, it works alongside Apache ActiveMQ for messaging
and asynchronous processing, an Oracle database for logging, Aspose.Pdf for PDF parsing,
ABBYY RS for optical character resolution, and custom-developed Web services. WSO2
ESB is installed in a clustered environment based on Microsoft technologies and a virtual
platform.
The SIBUR integration platform (see figure 1) connects the enterprise content management
system with multiple ERP systems, an optical character reader (OCR), a client master data
management (MDM) system, and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, among
others.
SIBUR plans to use WSO2 ESBin two upcoming large projects: ECM system integration
with a new SAP ERP system and the rollover to the rest of the SIBUR subsidiaries.