Cooperative SOA Reaps Rich Harvest

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April 28, 2007

Cooperative SOA Reaps Rich Harvest

One of things I try to accomplish at this blogsite on a regular basis is relay stories of outstanding SOA successes, and the unique challenges organizations had to overcome to get there.

The latest SOA success story of interest to come over the wires comes out of Richmond, Va.-based Southern States, a coop owned by more than 300,000 farmers, selling farm supplies in 1,200 retail stores in 23 states.

The business challenge was price lists at the cooperative's retail stores -- stored in Oracle’s OneWorld ERP application, a homegrown point-of-sale application and an online catalog -- had to be manually updated by store employees, Karen Lankford, vice president of information systems, is quoted as saying. This created accounting headaches in trying to reconcile data and made it very difficult to quickly adjust prices to meet changing market conditions.

The company is rolling out a collaborative SOA-based modeling toolset to its 50 developers, which enables them to build and link Web services. The first service allows product pricing data stored in multiple systems to be changed easily.

Lankford estimates that this first service is helping the organization generate about $1.4 million in additional revenues a year. This is an interesting point, since the value proposition of SOA and Web services to date has been in cost savings and productivity, versus actual revenue generation. However, the article does not spell out how the price listing service translated into the additional revenues. It's likely that that employees had difficulty keeping up with market changes that affected the pricing of goods sold through the retail outlets, and as a result, many items may have been sold at lower than market rates. Having a service that monitors such fluctuations and automatically making changes across the entire network would keep things in line.

One of the biggest challenges to the SOA/Web services implementation at Southern States had been training developers to reuse code from other parts of the organization, Lankford told ComputerWorld. She noted that the company's newfound ability to reuse code will mark a “dramatic change” for developers. The coop must conduct “a campaign to convince people that this is the direction we are going,” she said. The company will need to have a few more visible internal “wins” using the software to help convince the developers that the tool can help ease application development work.

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