I'm always looking for stories that show how SOA delivers actual competitiveness and growth for businesses, and a recent account of Fastenal's transformation is a good one.
To speed up it's order fulfillment process to the point where it's as close to real time as you can get it, Fastenal turned to service oriented architecture.
Fastenal is a supplier of industrial and construction supplies, and this is one tough business -- even in good times, delays in orders can mean loosing customers. One summer in my younger days, I worked in the buyers' department of such a company, and it was go-go-go, a real frenzy of procuring quantities of supplies at the best prices. We had terminals linked to an IBM mainframe in the corporate office in Los Angeles, and it was all I could do to keep up with entering piles orders into the system. Of course, manually re-keying orders now really would put these vendors at a major competitive disadvantage. But still, many of these companies still rely on batch-mode file transfers to get orders through to their retailers or partners.
"Margins are razor thin and competition is fierce, it's easy for customers to switch suppliers," says Adam Swift, integration developer for Fastenal Corporation, writing in Baseline. "To retain and attract new customers, we needed a way to make Fastenal Corporation stand out and really deliver," he recounts. "When looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction, our order management system quickly emerged as the biggest area of opportunity.
Swift's team saw a SOA approach as the best way to efficiently drop orders to the stores in real-time. "This would enforce transparency and ensure all of our corporate orders were funneled through the new system, regardless of the source," Swift says.
This is the way things used to work: Orders that came in through the Website, EDI system, or homegrown vendor management system where funneled through Fastenal corporate headquarters and then distributed manually to individual stores. As Swift describes it:
There were also issues with timeliness, Swift relates. Orders were dropped to stores in batch mode, every hour. The problem was that "if an order was filed just before the last drop occurred, you would have to wait another hour until the next batch of orders dropped," Swift explains. "Any documentation, such as purchase acknowledgments, could also be delayed."
Swift's team deployed an architecture in which all order requests were sent to a single system using ActiveVOS from Active Endpoints, which enabled the company to orchestrate all the processes behind the consolidation. Oracle Web Services Manager was employed to manage all services from one central portal.
The new service-enabled order management system was run side by side with the old batch-mode file-transfer system for a few months until the full cut over. By running the systems side by side, Swift's team was able to document a 32-minute improvement in response time to stores.
Plus, as new projects come along, processes can be quickly assembled for the business with reusable services. "This is far more efficient and cost-effective then having to do some custom development every time a new project comes along," Swift says. "We are a lot more agile as a team because with an SOA, we can build the components ahead of time and we can plug them or unplug them as we wish, instead of deploying some new version of some program that lives somewhere and gets executed by some process."
To speed up it's order fulfillment process to the point where it's as close to real time as you can get it, Fastenal turned to service oriented architecture.
Fastenal is a supplier of industrial and construction supplies, and this is one tough business -- even in good times, delays in orders can mean loosing customers. One summer in my younger days, I worked in the buyers' department of such a company, and it was go-go-go, a real frenzy of procuring quantities of supplies at the best prices. We had terminals linked to an IBM mainframe in the corporate office in Los Angeles, and it was all I could do to keep up with entering piles orders into the system. Of course, manually re-keying orders now really would put these vendors at a major competitive disadvantage. But still, many of these companies still rely on batch-mode file transfers to get orders through to their retailers or partners.
"Margins are razor thin and competition is fierce, it's easy for customers to switch suppliers," says Adam Swift, integration developer for Fastenal Corporation, writing in Baseline. "To retain and attract new customers, we needed a way to make Fastenal Corporation stand out and really deliver," he recounts. "When looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction, our order management system quickly emerged as the biggest area of opportunity.
Swift's team saw a SOA approach as the best way to efficiently drop orders to the stores in real-time. "This would enforce transparency and ensure all of our corporate orders were funneled through the new system, regardless of the source," Swift says.
This is the way things used to work: Orders that came in through the Website, EDI system, or homegrown vendor management system where funneled through Fastenal corporate headquarters and then distributed manually to individual stores. As Swift describes it:
"We cobbled together a custom file-transfer system where we would drop the file to the store, in a 'fire-and-forget' manner. The store would fulfill the order. Occasionally, something would get lost. There was no real explanation for the lost order, because our file transfer system did not log the transfers, so we had no way to look back to see where and why the failure occurred."
There were also issues with timeliness, Swift relates. Orders were dropped to stores in batch mode, every hour. The problem was that "if an order was filed just before the last drop occurred, you would have to wait another hour until the next batch of orders dropped," Swift explains. "Any documentation, such as purchase acknowledgments, could also be delayed."
Swift's team deployed an architecture in which all order requests were sent to a single system using ActiveVOS from Active Endpoints, which enabled the company to orchestrate all the processes behind the consolidation. Oracle Web Services Manager was employed to manage all services from one central portal.
The new service-enabled order management system was run side by side with the old batch-mode file-transfer system for a few months until the full cut over. By running the systems side by side, Swift's team was able to document a 32-minute improvement in response time to stores.
Plus, as new projects come along, processes can be quickly assembled for the business with reusable services. "This is far more efficient and cost-effective then having to do some custom development every time a new project comes along," Swift says. "We are a lot more agile as a team because with an SOA, we can build the components ahead of time and we can plug them or unplug them as we wish, instead of deploying some new version of some program that lives somewhere and gets executed by some process."
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