BizTalk Server – The Business Value

We've looked at a couple of features of the product. Now let's understand how it all fits in the jigsaw of the typical business requirements

Thursday, June 08, 2006

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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

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