Setting the Standard

ASTM International is one of the world’s largest Standards Development Organizations. Its member base consists of 30,000+ scientists, researchers and academics – all of whom volunteer their time to publish and maintain standards in critical industries such as petroleum, manufacturing & metallurgy. ASTM ensures the products people buy and use daily have been made safely and are held to consumer standards. 

Goal Setting

  1. Real-Time Data Exchange between internal and external systems
  2. Flexibility to continuously add new tools and platforms to the ecosystem
  3. A better understanding of how systems integrate and communicate

Icreon and ASTM first worked together on a strategy exercise aimed at assessing the existing state of the technology landscape, and developing a blueprint to seamlessly connect all ASTM systems together in real-time – an initiative known as Real-Time Data-Exchange (RTDX). 

The Approach

Our teams started out by inventorying the current state of the digital ecosystem – the systems currently being used, the people who rely on those systems, and the processes that are dependent on those systems. From there, we needed to understand how data flows in and out of the business, which systems speak to each other from a data perspective, and what are the business goals for communication between systems.

For example: there are over a dozen different industries that the organization caters to, with tens of thousands of standards that have to be reviewed, maintained and updated regularly – all with various digital touchpoints that range from the general ledger all the way to publication shipping system. 
Throughout the assessment, there was a core observation that started to surface - this situation was ripe for the use of integration platform as a service (ipaas). Through ipaas, ASTM could utilize APIs from the various systems to create a well-designed information highway that ensures the right data gets to the right place, and start to hone in on which platforms should be the sources of truth.

 
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The Solution

With the solution architecture taking shape, Icreon’s global strategy team and ASTM technology leaders were able to define the future of the digital ecosystem. With a strong grasp on how data flows in and out of the businesses and the understanding of how best to integrate data and systems, the RTDX was born.

At it’s core, RTDX connects various systems, messages and alerts from all ASTM digital properties. It was built with scale in mind, so as new properties pop up within the ecosystem, they can easily plug into the RTDX network. Because it's built atop Azure cloud, we are able to scale up the RTDX network on-demand as data flows from one ASTM system to another.

Outcomes & Results

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Decrease in amount of time it takes to integrate a new platform
Growth in member-base since RTDX Launch
Increase in revenue since RTDX

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