To provoke some thought

[<marchadr@wellsfargo.com>]

I thought I would expand upon having an example company scenario to provoke some thoughts from the group now that there is the cap..work and initial blueprint work.


Company background:
Name: coalogic
Tagline: coal is our goal

Core business: online, retail stores selling a widget used for extracting coal out of a person's backyard.

They produce the widget known as "coal-boy" and provide consumers the possibility to buy it and get service for it through a variety of channels. Channels include: online, retail store, mail order catalog, and phone services.

They rely on other companies to provide shipping, raw materials, real estate for stores, etc...
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Organizational structure:

- administration and strategic vision
- finance and accounting
- customer service
       - support phone orders as well
- it operations
- warehouse operations
- inventory management
- product development
- sales and marketing
- retail management
   - with a hierachy based on regions and includes store management
- online services
- human resources
- catalog management (may be subset of marketing)
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Systems:
- inventory management 
    - for products already created
- shipping and tracking
    - looking to outsource this to their shipping supplier
- raw material management including vendor management
- crm
- accounting system 
- product planning system
- billing system for managing internal time tracking
- retail pos system
- online system
- phone system with associated customer support tools
- your typical dev env. With issue tracking etc
- etc... Probably more things I can't think of right now

----------------------------

So now the company wants to move to an soa. What do they do? What standards do they follow? What is the value soa might provide them? How many services would they have and what constraints are the constraints on those services?

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To start us off their major problem areas are:
- catalog team manages disperse data that is different than their inventory managment teams data.
- sales teams have no idea what the inventory is at a given time since there is a 24 hour delay reconciliation between online sales and the retail inventory systems that also need to be synced with the warehouse processing system of what need to go out. 
- their shipping supplier has an soa based system that they need to integrate with their warehouse management
- they want to look at having an on demand production line based on raw materials to product and the into the shipping pipeline to fulfill orders without having as much warehouse space
- the customer service system, retail pos, and online system have constent out of sync functionality as well as requirements since each one has a corresponding IT and business requirement team


Let's see where this goes.

- dan