Internet health and beauty retailer Quixtar has recently implemented components of the webMethods Fabric product suite as part of an initiative to improve supply chain agility and performance, the solution provider has announced.

Quixtar is the industry's 20th largest online retailer and the overall leader within the health and beauty category, according to Internet Retailer "Top 500 Guide" rankings. The company is leveraging webMethods technology to enable Web services-based interoperability between various enterprise systems, which has allowed the company to update or replace a number of legacy systems as it transitions to real-time operations of its supply chain.

According to SDCE, as a result of these efforts, Quixtar reported that it is seeing significant improvements in supply chain performance, including an improvement in inventory turns and replenishment rates.

"By minimizing our reliance on legacy systems, we improved the timeliness and accuracy of our supply chain while reducing the resource requirements that these aging systems imposed on our IT department," said Tina Abdoo, integration center manager for Quixtar. "webMethods offered us a real-time, scalable platform to which we could seamlessly transition our supply chain operations."

Abdoo added that the webMethods solution's support for Web services and its extensibility has enabled Quixtar to address ancillary requirements such as adding new vendors or products and deploying additional functionality.

While Quixtar's legacy purchasing and catalog systems were critical to its operations, they were also limited by inadequate integration. Specifically, these systems were costly to maintain, difficult to update and, due to their failure to fully integrate with the company's other enterprise systems, lacked the speed and agility that Quixtar desired.

As a result, the decision was made to shift the company's procurement and planning operations from its mainframe environment to its JD Edwards platform while also adding real-time integration of its existing merchandising, forecasting and planning applications as well. This necessitated a new integration architecture.