Business Network Transformation

trade Network interlingual renditionIt is nearly impossible to imagine any company in this global economy that operates isolated and does not act with suppliers, partners and vendors at some stage. This global eco frame is remoulding relationships between companies in new and often uncomfortable ways. Companies argon organizing collaborative partnerships globally to support their personal credit line operations locally. That extends their railway line value and gain matched advantage. These endeavours are seeing beyond conventional line of product line boundaries to lower costs, increase profit and improve quality of serve they offer up by tapping into applications, personnel, and infrastructure irrespective of where they reside. So, companies are looking to gain competitive advantage by leveraging these novel opportunities arose from intercompany interactions.Though backing Network Transformation is not a new archetype, this idea had been kept apart from action due to I T limitations. Companies traditionally focused on customers, internal processes and cost cutting to denounce their duty in this ecosystem. But IT has interchanged this perception recently. Enhanced IT capabilities for communication, collaboration and information sharing caused increasing global competition. Companies realised a new way of doing stemma working in concert while working for others. Examining their value chains and understanding this competitive weapon resulted in formation of job Networks.This paper contains the following topics byplay Network transformation explained with exampleHow IT serves line of reasoning networks and role of IT in business network transformation avail Oriented Architecture (SOA) explained with 3 success storiesRelating Service Oriented Architecture to Enterprise Resource grooming packagesConclusionBusiness Network TransformationAccording to Philip Lay and Geoffrey Moore, Business Networks are groups of companies that work together towar d a specific objective for mutual financial benefit. The example below helps to understand Business Network Transformation.Business network of Cellular Phone bon tonPartnersMobile handset makers, Chipset stick outr, Network switching manufacturer, Contract manufacturers, Wireless carriers, Routing Vendors, Application enablers, Service providers voicemail, email, mobile search, banking, video streaming etc., Advertisers banks, pharmaceuticals, CPG companies etc., Consumers mobile phone owners, dealers enterprises etc.strategic ObjectiveA multi channel marketing strategy to transit from manufacturing handsets and equipment to a software answer provider.Business process and IT implicationsDemand data should be panoptical to ensure high level of retail stock through rapid supply chain response. This implies binding marketing programs and sell-out data to improve marketing diminish on putment.This example shows a company with collaborating partners in a business network and the ir strategic objective to transformation.As the definition of business networks has become know to everyone, the pace in which these networks are created and transformed and what IT resources are needed for this transition became a challenge.Role of IT in Business Network TransformationPotential to make out in this global market depends on businesss network of people and malleable processes. New technologies alike Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) enable these networks to amplify opportunities and flourish. Effective and efficient communication by sharing information across its ecosystem of suppliers, employees, customers and distributors is enabled by implementing such service oriented computer architecture and serve. Utilising these capabilities, companies can provide improved customer experience due to improved intercompany interaction. These potentials overly enable seamless interaction with intra company systems focusing on improving va lue chain.Taking full advantage of these global opportunities from business networks and becoming globally integrated enterprise demands high level of flexibility. Businesses need to merge impertinently acquired business potentials and technologies with legacy applications. Existing IT infrastructure must be adaptable to changes in business models and must be ready to accommodate them. Information is already being shared internally across departments within the business but now it has to be shared externally across business partners, across countries and continents. Business processes must be agile and consistent alignment between business and IT is little.Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)Service oriented architecture (SOA) enables business organizations to gain this agility needed to compete in global ecosystem. It divides the business into operable components that are easy to be drawn together quickly and economically. They are flexible enough to reuse in meaningful combinat ions to meet evolving business needs. These components are called Services. These combinations of serve enable efficient collaboration and communication across company lines and unearth information buried within business processes.According to IBM, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is A business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. Service oriented architecture is essentially collection of services. These services are loosely coupled and implemented in standard ways. In other words, caller needs no fellowship of the technology or location of service provider. For example Create invoice as a service can be invoked by any other business unit or from any business application when invoice needs to be created. consume defined Enterprise SOA as A blue print for an adaptable, flexible and open IT architecture for developing services-based, modular business solutions.Three features of an SOAThese t hree features provide value in a business by implementing SOA.Software reuseReusing components is one of the important advantages of SOA. Reusable components enable companies to rid of redundancy. For example a business has many functional silos and each silo usually needs information from other silo such as customer information or invoice. When these silos are using disparate technologies and are direct on different programmes, they need duplicate instances of this information in each silo. SOA creates unity version of such services which can be shared across all functional silos.Composite applicationsComposite applications are new cross-functional applications formed by combining functionality from many subsisting systems. For example, SOA enables companies to provide a single point access to a range of products through a self service portal for business partners. Usually this portal might be a combination of different processes with different technologies supported by IT serv ices.Standard interfaceCaller of a service does not need to have knowledge about services location or technology platform on which it was developed. Interface to services in SOA takes standard form. This facilitates a flexibility to run services where they are needed irrespective of location and technology with greater ease. It can also increase IT ability, improve quality of service and reduce costs.Coming to business partners, these loosely coupled, standard interfaced services provide extra benefits. Partner need not to be aware of progress of death penalty of a service, as SOA provides transparence of location and technology. Standard interface enables partners to call a service having minimum information about the service.In essence, the below are the benefits fall into three business categoriesBusiness EffectivenessBusiness agilityGreater speed in responsiveness to marketCompetitive advantageImproved business process efficiencyAccuracy in deployment of resources according to business needsCost factorMaintenance costs are reducedMinimum skills and efforts needed for business changeOptimized price due to choice of platform, technology and locationRisk factorIncremental deploymentEnhanced IT qualityOptimized payback timesEnterprise Resource Planning and Service Oriented ArchitectureA single system capable of accommodating business data which is centralised and accessible across all functional areas in the company was the basic concept of ERP. Before ERP era, data would flow across business units but not stored in one system. The single system was the selling point of all ERP vendors like SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle etc. ERP carrying out requires no service work to integrate smaller components but ERP implementation usually required greater customization. Without customization, ERP software packages seldom matched business processes and getting to the ready to work status. Though implementing ERP results many advantages, it has few drawbacks in terms of cost, customization and timeline for implementation. So ERP implementation and support are expensive and time consuming. It is also costly in the area of upgrading because it is tightly coupled package. The evolution of Service oriented architecture concept focused on these pitfalls of ERP. The Enterprise application vendors used client server technology in 1990s and web client technology in 2000s. at one time they are transiting to Service oriented architecture approach to ERP. This blend of ERP based on SOA is the outperform of breed approach facilitating customers to have more options to select services from any vendor. SOA can be said as father of modern IT architectures. Due to this combination, ERP components became services in Service oriented architecture. The below two are leading ERP vendors who recently released their ERP package based on SOA,SAP Enterprise SOASAP NetWeaver is the new product based on SOA. SAP NetWeaver is a platform on which other components such as F inances, Human Resource, Business Intelligence, Business process outsourcing etc are implemented. It boasts the advantages based on its SOA features such as web connections, Business network transformation etc.Oracle Oracle Fusion MiddlewareFusion Middleware is Oracles product based on SOA. It is a family of products seamlessly integrated to run agile business applications. Business Intelligence, User Interface, Content watchfulness, SOA Process Management etc. are components in this package.IBM Smart SOASmart SOA is a set of guiding principles derived from solidified best practices and documented projects. They have created entry points to each of their products such as Business Intelligence, BPM etc. These entry points are undertaking well defined, focused and separate project to meet individual business need.The role of SOA in Business Network Transformation can be easily understood from the success stories below.Ergon takes crude oil business to the webErgon is United Stat es based Petroleum Company. It is a privately owned company with 2,500 employees. It specializes in petroleum products with up and downstream operations like refineries, sales and final trucking.Business needErgon wanted to integrate internal processes to improve access to the information and to de mover that information to its customer. The company wanted to realise self service portals and automated workflows to accelerate budget panegyric processes.SolutionErgon has more than 50 operations within the business and each of which is a opulent profit centre that reports back to the headquarters. They implemented SAP business workflow on existing SAP infrastructure to support purchasing and to automate approval of requisitions. Ergon also implemented IBM Totals store DS6800 and changed its databases to IBM D2 facilitating upgrade their ERP to SAP ECC 6.0 in future.BenefitsEnterprise wideSAP standardized their business processes. SAP enabled Ergons employees to gain consolidated co nsume of individual workflow and to make better deals with their vendors. SAP ECC 6.0 based on SAP NetWeaver fetches more options for Ergon in the future. Portals enabled users to view core functionality tailored rigorous to business needs. SAP NetWeaver created single enterprise platform.They could successfully align their business needs with their SAP ERP solution with greater flexibility and helping Ergons transition to SOA.Business flowErgon implemented SAP business workflow to support purchasing process as part of its ongoing enhancements to internal efficiency. SAP workflow shaft of light accelerated approval of requisition process. This saved lot of administrative time by generating automated routing and emails. SAP business workflow reduced administrative workload and accelerated purchasing. After successful implementation of workflow tool and gained benefits from it, Ergon is now looking to extend this tool into other functional areas such as forgiving resources.Storage PerformanceInformation access rates were improved and they saved 10-12 hours per weekend on database maintenance. This enabled freeing technical staff and to achieve better throughput for live users. They could increase the access up to 17 times faster than before. DS 6800 made reports and transactions through SAP applications run much more quickly. Storage operation is increased with new storage systems DS6800 and DB2 for business critical SAP systems.StabilitySAP and IBM worked together and IBMs DB2 is constantly supporting SAP applications. As performance and availability have become important aspects in extending SAP applications to more functional areas, this combination of SAP applications and IBM DB2 on IBM hardware using AIX operating system is helping Ergon to deliver excellent response times.Bezeq setup SOABezeq is Israel based leading telecommunications provider. It is a privately owned company with 7,700 employees and with r compensateue of US $ 1 Billion. Its product a nd services range includes, domestic, international and cellular phone services, internet and data communication services.Business needBezeq wanted to maintain focus on new vision that is customer facing. In the highly competitive industry they wanted to keep their market shares regulated tightly. Field technicians needed equipment with mobile capabilities such as to prepare electronic bills, or customer receipts etc. They also planned to architect a reusable set of web services.Their objectives were to avoid constraints of location with handheld mobile devices and to provide application developers with a reusable set of services.SolutionBezeq implemented SAP NetWeaver technology platform including exchange infrastructure, enterprise portal components and vane Dynpro development environment for mobile computing.BenefitsEnterprise wideEnd to end business process integration was made possible by implementing SAP NetWeaver. This platform also enabled real time monitoring of field repa ir procedures. As NetWeaver is based on SOA, Bezeq was able to achieve improvements in processes skirt service calls. Bezeq achieved speed in service completion from assignment to invoice. It has time to focus on streamlining its core telecommunications processes.Avoiding constraints of physical locationField technicians are disposed PDAs to receive service calls through which they can order replenishments which also updates central inventory and customer records. They can use these PDAs from their homes and even while travelling. They can even get work related messages and use their cars as local and mobile warehouse for receiving and distributing parts to customers.Reusable servicesFor mobile computing, team has chosen entanglement Dynpro development environment. It is actually to program technician PDAs to access directly SAP NetWeaver portal component. Access to back end functionality that calls to the back end SAP system was encapsulated as reusable we services. Reduction in costs and risk in terms of both time and money is ensured by this use of encapsulated web services that is also flexible and reusable.Business model evaluationEquipment and supplies are optimally allocated and managed using tools that technicians use. Company eliminated hour long scheduling session and consequently saved probative amount of money. They started saving 3, 250 hours a week. Bezeq has also reduced average response times to service requests from 6 days to 2 working days that should help increase customer satisfaction.Wipro Technologies helps its customers to make it quickWipro Technologies is a division of Wipro Limited, the first global IT services organization to be certified in PCMM level 5 and SEI CMM level 5 and with annual revenue is US $4.3 Billion and 99,965 employees. They are one of the largest product engineering and support service providers globally. They have comprehensive enquiry and development and provide IT solutions and services like systems integrat ion, information systems outsourcing, software application development, package implementation and maintenance services.Business needWipro wanted to improve business process agility so as to improve customer experience for large automotive manufacturer in North America to increase competitive advantage. They also wanted to avoid difficulties involved in service level agreements in the areas of service contracts, monitoring agreements and track design times by deploying IT management tools. Wipro planned to increase security level in exposing IT services of the auto manufacturer.SolutionWipro implemented Oracle products and services including Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle SOA movement including web services manager and BPEL process manager. They also implemented Oracle Enterprise manager an ERP solution that includes Tuning pack, Diagnostics pack, Management pack for SOA and manakin management pack.BenefitsEnterprise wideOracles customer, the automotive manufacturer could roll o ut new services quickly and leveraged existing IT infrastructure and investments. They could successfully manage the implementation including services by various stakeholders, business units and vendors. Business to consumer portal enabled Wipros customer to access information online. They also gained the ability to go bad their IT infrastructure, capacity planning and service planning.Oracle SOA SuiteAs customer deployed Oracle SOA suite, it enabled them to roll out new services in fast pace while leveraging existing IT investments. Business to consumer portal developed using this suite allowed automotive manufacturer to access information such as vehicle service alerts, campaign information, recollection information and credit card reward points online. They also built a composite application enabled by SOA suite to aggregate account information self-collected from disparate functional units in the business. Earlier, this application development used J2EE and took over one year and now with SOA suite it took 90 days.As part of SOA suite, Web services Manager assure Oracles customer to have the appropriate authorisation to access services.Oracle Enterprise ManagerThis product from Oracle enabled its customer to proactively analyse IT infrastructure, service performance and capacity planning. As part of Enterprise Manager, Diagnostic pack enabled the automotive manufacturer to view problem areas in a single view.These success stories reveal how SOA enables businesses to gain competitive advantage by strengthening their business network and internal capabilities.ConclusionIn this commoditizing global economy it is critical to have the ability to operate effectively in business networks and to sustain competitive advantage. This ability to operate business effectively is made easy by Best of Breed IT solution (SOA and ERP) enabling businesses to excel at global scale. But the businesses have a challenge to come out of the shell to invest on these technologies to stand at the top in their niche markets. They also gain advantage of auditing their current infrastructure, business processes and integrate them to achieve single view.