Forget Integration: It’s About Business Process Orchestration Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

Service-oriented architectures will change the IT organization's experience at many levels. Increasingly, IT departments will realize the ability to take advantage of their vendors' SOA-enabled platforms to build composite applications tailored to support their own particular business processes.

That's part of the value play on-demand supply chain management vendor Click Commerce Inc. believes it will bring to its customers as it unites a host of its technologies, ranging from warehouse management to return and repair applications, under the SOA banner.

"The name of the game isn't integration, but orchestrating business processes across different applications" - and extending that capability to its customers, as well, says Michael Anderson, director of engineering for supply chain at Click Commerce. "A big difference between standard integration and business process orchestration is that traditionally, integration is asynchronous and transactionally based..... Business process orchestration allows us to let systems communicate in a conversational manner."

Click Commerce, a 15-year-old company, began life focusing on the supply and demand chain space, but has grown in the last few years via acquisitions that have moved it into master data management, contract service management, and other areas.

That led to the challenge of how to tie together all the different features of its products in a cohesive fashion. Last year Click Commerce went live with its first SOA deployment, largely linking the supply chain and service parts components of its product line, relying on the OAG XML format for message transmissions.

'Value for our customers'

This summer, it's planning an SOA pilot with its demand chain product line. The plan is to build an order entry system to let orders be taken and then communicated to the vendor's Network Logistics supply chain visibility and event management tool. That tool will figure out how to source and cost orders, and then pass back information to the demand chain solution.

"Building composite applications has a lot of value for our customers," says Anderson. "It really lets us tie together best-of-breed in a cohesive fashion."

Behind Click Commerce's SOA is Oracle's BPEL Process Manager, part of its Fusion Middleware line, which serves as the core engine for Click Commerce's enterprise service bus. With the ESB, Click Commerce has built a routing engine to deal with the rules of how to tie together different applications.

"By configuring different combinations of routing rules, it's very easy to come up with different process flows and ways of sending messages around," Anderson says.

Click Commerce now is working on tying application components into Europa, its master data management program.

"One of the challenges when we get into integrating this many systems is how to tie together the master data and make sure that stays synchronized across systems," says Anderson.

That's just one of the challenges to this new level of integration. Up-front planning to lay out the business process flow between different systems for optimum performance is key. That's something customers will have to consider, too, to best take advantage of the SOA-enabled architecture to configure their own routing rules.

The actual linking is fairly easily accomplished. The customer can use Click's routing rules to send different messages that come across the bus to their external systems. For example, a customer might want to receive data into Click Commerce's warehouse management system, generating a receipt message to its Network Logistics product, but they may also want their business process to include sending that receipt message out to their own accounting system, so they know they have more inventory on hand to account for.

"By good planning and knowing the process flow, the implementation is much smoother," advises Anderson.

And for Click Commerce, SOA has provided a faster and cheaper route to integration than traditional point to point solutions. Presumably, that will extend to customers, too.

"We end up long-term reducing the total number of interfaces needed," says Anderson. "We also found the cost to create individual interfaces is about 1/5 of what it used to be."