How SOA Kept One Company from Getting Creamed

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October 02, 2007

How SOA Kept One Company from Getting Creamed

Many products -- especially software -- can sit on shelves for years without raising a stink. Not so in the sour cream business -- if today's product doesn't ship, things can get really, well, sour.

That was the challenge facing Daisy Brand, a leading domestic sour cream manufacturer headquartered in Dallas, TX. Like most companies these days, the company had a variety of systems and formats that tended to throw monkey wrenches into its distribution processes.

Order changes, for example, span manual (fax, email, spreadsheets, etc.) and system functions (EDI, ERP, third party freight, home-grown logistics and shipping applications), causing the process to slow and increasing spoilage costs. There were yawning gaps between systems, business processes and employee roles coupled with inevitable customer-driven changes were causing those processes to breakdown and impact the business.

SOA and new process technologies saved the day, according to Kevin Brown, Daisy Brand's director of IS, who spoke at the recent Gartner BPM Summit. Interestingly, the company went with a Microsoft-intensive platform on which to build its SOA.

Daisy Brand's first priority was to automate as many processes as possible, yet preserve the flexibility of the manual system to adapt to customer demands. The company sought to convert "order change" and many other business functions could become services in process-based applications.

The company went with Ascentn's AgilePoint Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework. The company's order change process now incorporates everything from a faxed order to customer EDI shipping acknowledgements to RFID product information flowing across an Enterprise Service Bus.

Brown states that Daisy Brand generated a positive return on investment within six months and provided shared visibility into the order change process across groups and roles. This enabled employees to examine the actual state of an order to proactively address issues. Now "order change" is an easily used business service within an Microsoft SharePoint Server-based employee portal as a part of Daisy Brands' growing SOA library of process-based services.

Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us