TransCanada Phases out SAP, Goes for Best of Breed

Software Magazine, August, 2000 by Elizabeth U. Harding

When TransCanada PipeLines Limited (TCPL) merged with Nova Corp. in 1998, the new company became the fourth largest energy company in North America, managing more than 23,000 miles of natural gas pipelines as well as many other assets. Since both companies had very different infrastructures, IT had some tough choices to make: what to keep, and what to phase out.

On the Nova side, there was a highly integrated SAP ERP system run by an outsourcing company. On the TCPL side, there was a variety of internally developed and purchased applications that were, for the most part, not integrated.

"In order to derive benefits from a single process for the merged companies, we had to move quickly," says Jim Shultz, manager of shared business systems at TransCanada's Transmission division, Calgary, Alberta. "We put a team together that went through a fairly formal decision-making process to decide whether we should adopt Nova's infrastructure and stay on with SAP or move to a best-of-breed strategy"

After a lengthy review TransCanada decided to phase out SAP and go with a best-of-breed strategy covering applications such as accounting, HR, project management, maintenance, procurement, and materials management.

A Better Integration Method

When TCPL began to integrate its systems primarily using traditional point-to-point interfaces, it had to use more than 40 interfaces within the business suite of applications and another 100 interfaces to systems outside the suite. It quickly became clear that a better method was needed, Shultz says.

"We had IBM's MQSeries as a transport on the Nova side, but we didn't have anything substantial in terms of an integration toolset," says Shultz. "Working with the internal application engineering R&D team, we decided on a middleware solution using a combination of Forte Fusion, Java, XML, and a homegrown Java-based adapter framework."

TCPL selected Sun Forte Fusion because the product provides the integration architecture that conforms to the industry standards in data exchange (XML) and protocols (HTTP).

"These capabilities, together with the process-driven integration approach, provide a flexible and extensible integration architecture that allows us to adopt changes more readily. The fact that developers were familiar with the Forte 4GL suite of tools [ADE and Conductor] for several years makes it a natural evolution for us to adopt the product," says Liza Yuen, manager of the application engineering area.

A Wider Scope

When Sun Microsystems acquired Forte last October, Sun widened the scope of the Forte development environment with the Forte Fusion integration suite, pushing it into enterprise application integration as a solution for both integrating and extending current systems.

Forte Fusion includes Forte Conductor, for driving a business process (even something as massive as SAP R/3 can become a component in a Conductor process flow); Forte Fusion Backbone, which consists of proxies through which Conductor can communicate with applications via XML; an XSL (XML Specification Language) rules base supporting the proxies, interpreting and transforming messages to and from XML; and Application Connectors for applications that do not have a native HTTP/XML interface.

Shultz says TransCanada successfully completed a pilot a few months ago using the Forte Fusion engine to initiate and manage the transfer of XML-contained API requests and data flow to various applications. "We phased out all of SAP except for the HR component," says Shultz. "That's the only module we're keeping live. Everything else has been replaced by best-of-breed applications."

TCPL's best-of-breed applications won't be as tightly integrated as they were with SAP but, according to Shultz, that is not necessary.

"We are integrating where it adds value. The best-of-breed scenario allows us to respond quickly to changes in specific business areas, or even replace entire systems with reduced impact and dependency on other systems," he says.

Responding to Change

A key focus for TransCanada, according to Shultz, is to provide an infrastructure for easy-to-configure communication among loosely coupled applications and data.

Using a distinct abstraction layer for integration logic that sits between the process logic in Conductor and the various applications, business processes can be changed at the business level with no impact on the applications themselves.

Trans Canada's innovative work using Forte in other application areas recently helped Sun win a Crossroads 2000 A-List Award in the Application Process Integration category.

"I think this is a great example of putting our IT vision to work," says Art Smith, vice president of information systems at TransCanada. "Working hand in hand with our business partners, we're collectively using our skills and keeping our commitment to customer service and cost reduction."