Comoto Holdings is America’s largest powersports aftermarket retailer serving motorcycle enthusiasts everywhere through Cycle Gear, J&P Cycles and RevZilla.com. They have 150 stores nationwide and over 90 years of combined experience. Comoto Holdings also uses JD Edwards. At BLUEPRINT 4D 2023, John Phillips, CNC at Comoto, shared how the operations team at Comoto Holdings decided to incorporate robots into their warehousing system, but they ran into some Orchestrator errors.
The two main issues were:
- Issue 1: How do we develop our system before the robots arrive?
- Issue 2: How do we track the orchestration data?
How do we develop our system before the robots arrive?
To address this problem, the team ended up selecting Postman. Previously, they had used Postman for troubleshooting, but this would be the first time using it for a bigger purpose. Fortunately, Postman had a cloud project that was easy to connect and write data from Orchestrator, as long as you were inside the Comoto network.
Postman was the best solution because it was a fairly short learning curve, easy to connect to JD Edwards, and easy to connect to the 3rd party vendor.
How do we track the orchestration data?
Another issue that needed addressed was the ability to track Orchestration data as Comoto needed to know what data was being sent, if a response was received, error/success codes, and to easily identify the Orchestration and sub-Orchestration that was being used. To address this problem, Comoto developed a custom application to track and save the JSON data from the Orchestrations and place it into a custom table.
The image below shows an example of what this Orchestration might look like.
The benefits of tracking all orchestration data include:
- Troubleshooting: Once you save orchestrations and start getting orchestrator errors, you can save those errors.
- Notifications: Query data for specific situations and alert users.
- Automatic reprocessing: Some errors allow for automatic reprocessing of the failed transaction.
- Data verification: Some errors trigger data verification processes between the two systems.
- Health checks: Health checks make sure the connected warehouses are up and running. If not, requests are saved and processed once the other system is available.
Today, Comoto’s ordering architecture begins with an order placed from one of several websites. Next, the order moves through E1 Order Picks and the 3rd party inventory tote scanning. Then, the E1 Orchestrator connects to a 3rd party warehouse execution system, which coordinates with the robots. The system is working smoothly, thanks to Comoto’s innovation with Orchestrator.
For more details about Comoto Holding’s story, watch part one of this BLUEPRINT 4D 2023 session recording: JD Edwards Ignite Sessions.