“SOA not catching on” says Paul Krill in Computerworld.
Krill: “rumours of SOA adoption rates are exaggerated,” in an industry report tossing cold water on the hot topic of SOA.
In a self funded study, titled Benchmarking: Service–Orientated Architecture, Nucleus Research and partner KnowledgeStorm says, “SOA has been hyped for some time as a key way for companies to improve developer productivity, shorten project cycle times, and enable better integration in heterogeneous environments.”
“The SOA concept involves using standards–based reusable software components to develop applications built on business processes and enable integration," says Krill.
John Irvin, National MIS Manager of mega fulfilment house Hermes Precisia, HPA, based in NSW, Australia, recently rolled his sleeves up and proved to his satisfaction that the Vantage 8 SOA capability using Service Connect is not mere hype. It works and has many practical business uses for HPA who are implementing Vantage 8.
The process for Service Connect training involved John Irvin with COGITA and Epicor people who were organized into teams. John provided real business problems that HPA wanted solved. The training was for three days with two hands on days.
Example 1. Replicate a current process that exists within the HPA legacy application using SOA. The idea is that a quote essentially represents a supply contract. HPA will supply the customers with the required quantities of the requested products on demand. The expected input file, (probably an XML file), will contain a reference to the quote number, a run number and the expected quantities to be generated by each of the production processes. The quote will be used to create a sales order with all of the details such as delivery terms, prices, salespeople and warehouses, which will be filled in automatically from the quote and the details from the input file. A job will then be created automatically from the sales order. HPA haven’t yet decided on all of the details of the process but it is believed that Service Connect will be able to complete all of the requirements that HPA will have.
The example took the workshop team members two days to write to prove that it will work. Further work is required for validations, appropriate error checking and reporting. The application is expected to be used when phase II of the HPA implementation project goes live in 2008. To compare development work times between the original development within the legacy application and this new process, is difficult due to the legacy application process expanding over time. The process within Service Connect is expected to be a significantly smaller development task due to the use of the standard web services to complete the task.
Example 2. To creating a payroll journal from the Micropay file which is currently a 1000 line entry. As cutting and pasting this many records wasn’t an option, HPA have a work around to bring in their payment journal but want a much more elegant solution. The Service Connect workshop found this was a matter of creating a GL posting group, then attaching a journal header, and journal lines, Credit Bank, and Debit the Wage Expense accounts. HPA will be able to generate the export file from Micropay at the push of a button. John Irvin expects to use this application on completion of development and testing.
The team took a day to prove that the exercise will be possible and will now focus on completing this exercise with all of the necessary error checking and processing steps included.
Example 3. The import/creation of a count list for a stock take from a spreadsheet. HPA have warehousing complications where a bin may hold stock owned by several different customers and has a requirement to complete stocktakes for an individual customer’s stock. The team proved that the count list report using Vantage Service Connect would work. The development work on this issue took team members a day. HPA’s general issue of how they will do stocktakes remains a separate issue to solve.
From swapping stories with John Irvin at the recent Epicor Sydney Customer Day, Siew Loh from Wilson Transformer said they are also working on using Service Connect. They have a laboratory system which is used to raise invoices for laboratory services jobs (preventative maintenance on high voltage transformers). Service Connect will be used to import these into the Vantage Accounts Receivable, where the invoices will then be printed and sent.
The best bit is that all V8 Vantage programs are created as web services. This means that changes can be made anywhere easily. Most importantly after any upgrade including patch release code changes the change will still work.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT www.cogita.com
