SOA Helps You MOVE
It's always great to hear about successful adoption of SOA, and its particularly exciting when its being used for what you'd think. :)
MOVE, Inc. has recently finished up a really cool SOA project to integrate together and streamline a set of processes a variety of externally facing web sites with internal CRM solutions. The solution involves the use of BPEL, Web Services, ESB Mediation, application adapters, and canonical data models.
The business benefit to all this from a high level is that MOVE, Inc. was able to improve customer service by improving visibility of customer information across all their systems and improved processes while helping reduce the cost of ownership for its existing applications including Oracle's Siebel CRM and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management.
Before I get into how they did it, first a little bit about MOVE, Inc. and the challenges they faced -
Move Inc., formerly Homestore, Inc., is the leader in online real estate. Through it's network of sites (below) Move, Inc provides information on real estate property listings (homes and apartments), moving, home and garden and home finance. .
Move's network of websites:
REALTOR www.realtor.com
Moving www.moving.com
Senior Housing Net www.seniorhousingnet.com
In the midst of rapid growth, their challenge was they needed to consolidate disparate applications across two of its business units into an enterprise standard CRM solution that could scale to meet its evolving needs and provide a single, accurate view of customer data to improve efficiencies and automate auditing, billing and fulfillment processes.
Move's business units had custom applications built on the .Net framework for supporting their customer relationship functions and order creation. There were numerous disparate systems and manual touchpoints built to support various business functions for customer relationship management. In an effort to consolidate these applications into an enterprise standard CRM solution and also provide an application which could scale to the growing needs of the business, a CRM solution consisting of Oracle Customer Data Hub, Siebel and PeopleSoft integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware was proposed to enable the following.
Consolidated Customer Database
Support for Existing Sales Activities
Order Capture
Integration with Fulfillment Systems
Integration of customer usage from web sites into Siebel
Integration to PeopleSoft Billing
It sounds like a pretty tall order.
As part of the implementation MOVE worked with CSC (Computer Sciences Corp). CSC built a SOA that focused on re-usability of services. CSC also ensured that the business processes were at least as efficient if not better than what the current systems offered. Using standard WSDL interfaces, Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle ESB were used to extend the reach and normalize the integration across Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and other systems both internal and external (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Using BPEL, ESB, and Web Services to help implement their SOA, Move extends the visibility of customer data.<o:p></o:p>
How They Got There
The first step in the design process was to model the future business process and identify the functionality that would be enabled through Siebel and the key integration points with the various systems. Move and CSC worked together to define canonical data models for customer, order, listing, usage and billing information and created service contracts for each of the Web services that were used in the integration. CSC then build new streamlined processes as BPEL orchestrations using Oracle BPEL Process and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (Figure 2) -
Figure 2: Canonical data models allow processes to be constructed that generically orchestrate a common set of canonical services to without the need for specialized point-to-point data transforms
Service contracts were defined for each of the web services that would be used in the integration. The customer information was then consolidated from the multiple systems that the two business units had into the Oracle Customer Data Hub. Customer Data Hub also serves as the hub of customer information and provides visibility of customer information across the various systems in real-time including Siebel and PeopleSoft.
Integrations were developed as BPEL orchestrations for processes such as Order Fulfillment and Account/Customer Information creation across the various systems. Oracle Customer Data Hub is used to maintain customers for other business units. Oracle ESB is used to receive real-time outbound business events from Oracle Customer Data Hub and synchronize the customer information with PeopleSoft Enterprise (Figure 3).
Figure 3: ESB combines Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to synchronize customer information between Customer Data Hub and PeopleSoft
So, What's the ROI?
BTW, this all took them 6 months to implement and deploy. The net results are that Move was able to achieve the following benefits of this CRM Solution.
Real-time integration across these systems
Process Improvement and improved efficiency
Visibility of Customer Information across all the systems
Reduction in cost of ownership on existing applications
Quicker integration of new products into back office applications
From a long term perspective, this solution allows Move to
Leverage and Protect their existing investments with their .Net applications
Integrate back office applications from future acquisitions into this CRM Solution efficiently
Extend and Evolve this CRM Solution and mitigate the need to enhance their existing applications to support business needs
Dave
