SOA Case Study: Evolution of an Enterprise Service Network

Velocity improvements follow from the SOA approach. Because application development becomes more like "application assembly" when building on existing services, SOA development time is slashed. Whereas application complexity was high with monolithic systems design, the modularity and relative simplicity of application components in an SOA makes them easier to understand and therefore to enhance and change. In addition to lowering costs, the ability to outsource or purchase packaged solutions, and then easily integrate them into the application environment, speeds change. The following SOA case study brings these concepts to life by following the evolution of an enterprise service network.

A manufactured goods enterprise has begun to build up excess inventory in a perishable product line. It must be cleared to avoid a material write-off. A business decision is made to discount the price on this line of products and to promote this offer to customers likely to purchase.

A SOA Case Study: The ease of building Web services-based applications sped development of this customer-service interface.

The business unit IT organization was tasked with creating a supporting application. The diagram above shows the result. The company had recently implemented a CRM system with a set of native Web service interfaces providing access to customer information. Their existing ERP system was not accessible via a Web services interface, so an application server was used (with an adapter providing ERP system access) to make inventory information available through a Web service. The company’s homegrown mainframe-based order management system was combined with two externally provided Web services in another application server to create a Web service for order management – query, add, delete.

With the services in place, an application was rapidly assembled to execute on the customer service representative (CSR) workstation that would: query the order history of an inbound caller, examine their historical buying patterns, look up inventory levels for the products most likely of interest and calculate an appropriate discount offer based on an adjustable algorithm. The offer was then presented to the CSR in the first five seconds of the phone call where it could be worked into the call script.

Initial Benefits

In this case, some services had to be created where they did not exist. But once created, the application development process took just days. This type of scenario is repeated over and over again in the annals of Web services development. Read SOA Development: Speeding Time to Market for the conclusion of this case study.

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