BizTalk Server — The Business Value

Over the entire series we've explored the fascinating

technology behind BizTalk Server 2004 . Now let's briefly look at the business

benefits this interesting technology has to offer. To do is, we will delve into

the usual business requirements across the functional verticals and then take a

closer look at how BizTalk would help achieve them, or in some cases, even

supersede them. Throughout the series we have been mapping to the technical

features, and considered business responsiveness—or agility and reliability.

These, of course, mean different results in each of the functional domains.

BizTalk Server poses itself as an EAI (Enterprise

Application Integration) and a BPM (Business Process Management) tool. This

means that it helps integrating several disparate applications and provides an

elegant user interface to create homogeneous workflows encompassing these

integrated systems.

Let's now closely look at the retail functional vertical

to demonstrate how BizTalk Server helps solve various functional issues with

this domain. We will go through the typical business scenarios and understand

how BizTalk helps achieve what a typical business wants — to squeeze in more

value for money or simply put, increase the ROI.

Retail scenarios



Retail industries are about knowing statistics, analyzing trends and

streamlining the fulfillment process. To increase penetration in the customer

base, the retail industry can boast about varied ordering and fulfillment

channels. Multiple ordering channels include the retail company website, or a

partner website or even completely varied interfaces like SMS, call centers or

kiosks or any other channel that can be feasible for the business. These

channels provide access to various products and services that are offered by the

company. Delays and inefficiencies creep in with the lack of a centralized

processing system. The system needs to be scalable enough to accommodate the

growing customer base.

Being more of a B2C type, flexibility proves to be one of

the most critical factors, with flexible discounting structures and various

schemes that can help increase revenue for the company. Ordering, accounting and

delivery functions need to integrate in a homogeneous manner to facilitate a

smooth running system in the retail industry.

Reporting and trend analysis again forms an imperative part

that allows the decision makers to align the sales and marketing strategies to

best suite the customers buying habits, thus, again offering an increased ROI.

In addition to this, a significant number of retail companies rely on one or

more suppliers to supply the products that they deal in. This induces additional

overhead of managing these supplier profiles and interaction. Also, the

inventory system needs to be integrated with the Line-of-Business systems of the

suppliers to ease and speed up the procurement process.

Similarly, the retail companies, more often than not, also

rely on one or more fulfillment partners that help alleviate them of the

shipping process. Managing all these tasks with minimum manual interventions

along with a very high degree of flexibility is the goal for any integration

solution designed for the retail industry.

The BizTalk way



The Microsoft Commerce Server is specifically designed for alleviating the

pains of the retail industry. It helps configure important parameters for retail

business, like varied and flexible discount structures, sales campaigns, etc.

Here BizTalk pitches in as a pure integration solution and helps leverage the

Commerce Server features. Embracing the customer-centric approach, let's start

with the business requirement of front-ending the retail solution to the

customers.

Having multiple ordering channels provides additional

flexibility to the customer, thus, resulting in better customer affinity. By

exposing the BizTalk workflows as Web services, a service based interface is

created that can be used by the various front-ending channels. This helps create

a Service-Oriented Architecture that will be able to accommodate any additional

customer service channels with ease. A typical front-end, be it a website, a

partner system, a kiosk or a SMS Server, needs to invoke the web service to

avail the services.

Service orientation helps the service to be invoked from

any client (front-end), irrespective of the platform. For example, the retail

company website can be developed using ASP.NET and the partner system might be

running on a UNIX box. But both can call the service without any restrictions

imposed.

Once the order is received in the BizTalk Workflow, BizTalk

can communicate with the Commerce Server using various Commerce Server 2006

adapters for BizTalk. These help communicate various details like orders and

inventory between the Commerce Server and BizTalk Server, thereby inducing the

much-needed flexibility in the entire retail scenario.

Another area of concern we discussed above, is the

procurement and fulfillment of orders. As retail companies interact with various

suppliers and fulfillment partners, they need an efficient mechanism to keep

track of them. While processing the order, as the Commerce Server takes a look

at the inventory, it can fire a request for purchase of a particular product

through the BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server can then initiate the Purchase Workflow and

send it to various suppliers by leveraging its BAS (Business Activity Services)

feature. The BAS provides efficient TPM (Trading Partner Management) feature by

using the role links. Hence, the BizTalk orchestration remains completely

unaware of the suppliers to whom the purchase order has been sent. It sends the

purchase order to a role link that would represent multiple suppliers. As an

added advantage of this approach, the workflow is completely decoupled from the

suppliers systems. This decoupling allows easy switching between suppliers.

For example, if the company is currently dealing with three

suppliers—A, B and C-and for some reasons supplier C drops off and the

company decides not to interact with him. Another supplier D who is running

entirely different ERP system than supplier C, replaces him. Without decoupling,

the entire workflow would've been impacted. However, decoupling ensures that

the workflow remains the same while only the interaction for the new supplier

changes—still keeping the previous interactions unaffected. All this can be

done with a simple click-through interface and with very less or no coding at

all.

Even with automation in place, sometimes, human

intervention is required. In this case, the quotations received from the various

suppliers, can be reviewed by the Purchase Manager and then based on various

tangible and intangible aspects like — the amount of quotation, reliability of

the suppliers, relationship with the supplier, the purchase manager can approve

one of them.

The HWS (Human Workflow Services) feature of BizTalk can

allow this flexibility and provide the information to the purchase manager. As

an added advantage, the HWS can also generate alerts for the user that can be

delivered via e-mail or even Windows Messenger.

The TPM can be leveraged even for fulfillment scenarios

wherein the fulfillment request can be sent to a particular partner depending on

the type of request, or the area of delivery, or various other criteria. An

important aspect of the retail show is of course the Exception Reporting and

Trend Analysis. The BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) feature of BizTalk Server

can cater to the reporting needs. This intercepts the running workflows and

captures data to be recorded in the analysis databases. The data to be recorded

can be specified by the business analyst—again without any coding. BizTalk

Server captures this information with almost no impact on the performance.

The data can be used for creating reports in MS Sharepoint

or Excel. Over a period of time, as the data is gathered, it can be used for

trend analysis with Excel or any other tool. The data is stored in the analysis

database using the SQL Analysis Services, and, hence, allows leveraging the OLAP

features to the maximum. This becomes a critical aspect of the solution as it

allows business analysts to peek into the system and determine various buying

trends of the customers. This can help in further enhancing sales and marketing

strategies.

This pretty much addresses all aspects of a retail

solution. BizTalk Server heavily depends on the SQL Server at the back end. One

of the most important steps in making the BizTalk Server reliable is to make the

SQL Server stand firm on its feet even in cases of high loads. The SQL Server

already provides clustering facilities that can be leveraged here. Furthermore,

BizTalk Server allows scaling out on multiple SQL databases to increase the

reliability of the overall system and avoid load on a single SQL Server.

The BizTalk Server can also scale itself out on multiple

nodes, all using the same SQL databases, forming a BizTalk Server group. This

can help isolate the processing functions, thus, reducing the load on each

individual BizTalk Server.

For example, BizTalk receiving locations can be set up on

two load balanced servers. These can be responsible for getting the messages

from various systems. Once the messages are received, the processing can happen

on a third server. Thus, the processing server need not care about the load on

the receiving end. Likewise, depending on the actual requirement, a scale out or

scale up strategy can be planned, thus, providing a highly available and a

reliable environment for the system.

In Conclusion



In this concluding part, we tried to explain the key features of BizTalk

Server by using the retail industry as an example. We've explored several

features throughout the series including the Single Sign On, Human Workflows,

Trading Partner Integration, Rules Engine and Business Activity Monitoring.

Similarly, these features as wel as others can also be used in various other

functional domains like manufacturing, telecommunications, health care, media

and entertainment, and many more.

Sanket Bakshi