How Farm Credit Turned Its Silos into a 'Pinwheel'

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February 01, 2007

How Farm Credit Turned Its Silos into a 'Pinwheel'

At Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica), customer information didn't come easy. It was stored and managed in silos such as a mainframe-based loan accounting system, a third-party CRM system, a custom loan origination system written in Visual Basic, and a Web-based system dealer origination system written in Java.

Information was shared among the systems through nightly batch processing. However, as new report in SearchWebservices explains, FCSAmerica was running out of nighttime to complete an increasing batch load. "Every time we added or built something new, it added to the nightly batch processing," Beth Schmidt, director of application development, was quoted as saying.

Sometimes, the batch processing jobs took so long that they're weren't ready for the next business day. Plus, transactions were not in the system until the next day, and employees often were forced to rekey information that was needed for new transactions into another system.

The solution? You guessed it -- SOA.

But FCSAmerica even gave its SOA a name -- "Pinwheel." The SOA -- a shared-services CRM system, replaced this tangle of point-to-point connections with a single integration point. Information is processed through Pinwheel, stored in a "customer truth center" and published back to the customer-related systems, SearchWebservices reports.

Schmidt said the company was in process of having its VB-based loan origination system rewritten in VB.NET, and decided to extend the effort to reworking the system to share customer information across its business units. The implementation was built around Microsoft's BizTalk 2004.

The entire project took about 18 months, complete with the organizational issues you would expect with such a major transformation. "Everyone had different business rules," Schmidt said. "The process of getting them to agree on one standard was lengthy and difficult, and testing was lengthy because of the amount of things changing."

FCSAmerica's experience represents the classic, down-to-earth business case for moving to SOA. Many companies are saddled with plethoras of legacy systems that require end-users to log in and rekey information multiple times. Through composite applications and a service layer, organizations can see immediate savings from increased productivity, less data entry time, and faster responses to customer inquiries.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us