Dunlop Tyres South Africa: Flowgear As The Enterprise Integration Layer
Dunlop Tyres South Africa (a subsidiary of Japanese-owned Sumitomo Rubber Industries) manufactures and supplies premium tyres for passenger cars, SUVs, 4x4s, light trucks, and commercial vehicles. Dunlop combines global tyre innovation with a strong local heritage across South Africa and the African continent.
“If Flowgear is switched off, no sales could flow through the normal route, customers would not receive their electronic PODs, and our MES integration from SAP to the plant simply doesn’t run. Flowgear is currently a mainstay for both our commercial and production processes”
A Middleware Solution That Delivered all of Dunlop Requirements
During its major Salesforce rollout, Dunlop planned to integrate Salesforce with SAP. During the design phase, it became clear that what had been intended as middleware did not exist in the way the team expected. Salesforce pointed to their middleware solution as an additional purchase, which exponentially raised both cost and complexity concerns.
At the same time, Dunlop was relying on an in-house developed middleware tool to support international and domestic sales portals. It was an excellent temporary solution for the business, but they needed a long-term, enterprise-grade integration platform to support their needs.
Gerald Louis, Dunlop’s Information Systems Manager, went looking for alternatives. He found Flowgear online, reviewed material from CEO Daniel Chilcott, and thereafter met with Daniel, and an implementation partner before making the decision.
Sales and Production Depend on Flowgear
Dunlop first adopted Flowgear to integrate Salesforce and SAP. It has since become the standard middleware for several key systems:
- Salesforce and SAP.
- Sales Cloud CRM.
- Commerce Cloud – Domestic sales portal.
- Commerce Cloud – International dealer portal all integrated bi-directionally to SAP using SAP ECC nodes, IDocs, BAPIs, and database queries. Flowgear also streamlines how SAP’s fast-moving IDocs are delivered, allowing Salesforce to handle the load.
- Other connected systems.
- Slimstock Demand and Supply planning.
- Winfreight Electronic proof of delivery (ePOD).
- Payroll.
- Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for lot assurance.
- Multiple Data Warehouses for Workflow, TnA, etc.
Flowgear now replaces the earlier in-house developed middleware and serves as Dunlop’s enterprise integration solution.
Sales And Production Depend On Flowgear
The impact of Flowgear is most obvious when Gerald considers what would happen if it were turned off:
- Salesforce-driven sales would not flow seamlessly to and from SAP.
- Customers would stop receiving electronic PODs from the ePOD system, hampering our “Track and Trace” efforts.
- Demand planning and forecasting data into the plant would be disrupted.
- The MES lot assurance process would not have the capability to receive material from SAP.
Flowgear also absorbs some of the complexity that other systems cannot handle alone, particularly around the way SAP pushes data versus what receiving systems can process.
Dunlop Dealer POS, Our Very Own Standard API, and S4 HANA
Next, Dunlop is using Flowgear for:
- A Dunlop dealer POS integration project, extending automation into dealer point-of-sale systems.
- A future move from SAP ECC to S4 HANA, where existing Flowgear S4 HANA connectors position it to remain the middleware of choice.
- Launching their very own “TyreLink” API that would link seamlessly into any e-commerce portal, without sacrificing any of their cybersecurity requirements.
Flowgear is now treated as the standard integration layer for new projects at Dunlop, not just a once-off solution for Salesforce.
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