Enterprise Retail Solution

A Fortune 20 Reference - Case Study

Client: A recently acquired subsidiary that serves as the Retail & Office services arm of a Fortune 100 Corp.

Goal:

Unify customer base for all operating companies within the enterprise in support of following corporate initiatives:
- Provide a single view of a Customer within and across operating companies (op-cos) and functional channels
- Grow revenue
- Minimize operating cost
- Establish customer segmentation programs supporting Sales and Marketing efforts expanding over different op-cos
- Optimize management of the business
- Focus efforts on highest potential customer segments
- Differentiate between customer attrition and product declines
- More clearly identify individual impacts of Sales, Marketing, Product and Operations initiatives on sales, revenue and the bottom line
This initiative serves as the foundation for transitioning to a Single Account solution for the Enterprise along with additional details pertaining to the operating companies where the account would be used
Implement a comprehensive, systematic means to uniquely identify customers at both the Enterprise and Company level
Implement a centralized back office and call center application for account creation and maintenance

Existing Process

Invoiced, Non-Invoiced & Corporate discount accounts were created in ERP (People Soft - AR) at the subsidiary side & then manually in downstream
No capability to share information with the parent enterprise existed
Batch files were manually uploaded in downstream systems
No Dashboard available
Sales Commissioning had audit issues

The Challenges

Customer Creation

Accounts can arrive through various channels:
- Ecommerce Web portals of Enterprise or Op-co
- Mail/Fax/Email/1-800
- Lead Generation application (Corp. Account Exec)
- Batch loading by Sales rep & Field Ops
All accounts should be created in the new system and should gradually flow to all downstream enterprise systems:
- Enterprise Databases
- Mainframe Enterprise account generation system (shared b/w all op-cos/subsidiaries)
- Enterprise Duns & Bradstreet hierarchy matching system
- ERP (People Soft - AR)
- Point of Sale system used in stores (National customer DB)
- Vendor's Card Order Fulfillment
- Customer Taxation database (Tax-exemptions)
- Retek - Item and price management system
- System for sales commissioning
- Data warehouse
The new system should send account request attributes to a Enterprise-level account generation system, on acknowledgement of which it should create the account on the subsidiary side
Define, design, develop & implement an upstream BPM solution that supports enterprise initiatives
Build EAI capability around the BPM solution to push newly issued accounts to all downstream within the op-co & the enterprise

Customer maintenance

Fetch scattered customer elements from above mentioned systems, and implement the ability to present them on a single system via Enterprise Application Integration
Ownership of High-level data should be at the Enterprise level
All attributes, like invoicing, taxes, & pricing should be maintained in downstream systems within the operating company
Only a high-level customer attributes should be maintained and/or replicated in the new system with cross reference IDs to all downstream systems
There should be a real-time EAI call to fetch required information from downstream using the cross references. This on-demand data would be presented on the CAF (GUI) side along with the information already maintained in the new system
Keep information synchronized between all heterogeneous business systems

Other Challenges

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliant
Domestic & International customer have different business rules
Application Globalization
Card issuance & re-issuance order should be placed at the vendor.
A workflow based solution was desired
Dashboard Reporting, scorecards required for Executive management
Solution should have the ability to check customer credit using web service interfaces with credit agencies & Duns & Bradstreet
Implement Organization's security matrix for the application.

Solutions

Analyzed & Created 12 complex business processes using webMethods BPM. Key features were:
- Multi Process Correlation - Acknowledgment / Callback model
- Process Auditing
- Data Push to Downstream
- Business Rules (including complex taxation rules)
- Management Escalation capability in all Business processes
- 3L support capability
Created EAI interfaces with 16 different systems utilizing WM EAI capabilities
- JMS adapters
- EJB adapters
- JDBC adapters
- EDI feeds - 210, 810, 850
Developed a GUI-rich Ajax based Task Inbox. Key characteristics are:
- 'Saved Search capability' with multi criteria
- Task priority
- Displaying important task details on the Inbox
Leveraged Publish/Subscribe model and Service-Oriented architecture
Multi screen wizards on the UI (Task screens)
A live view of associated processes instances was accessible on the UI
Dashboard reports & KPI were implemented to captures different task & business metrics
Role based access control was implemented throughout the application

Technology

WEBMETHODS 7.1.X

Impacted Line of Business

Operations
- Customer Service & Collections
- Customer Administrative Services
- Customer Discount & Credit Cards
- Global Retail arm
Revenue Operations
Point of Sale
New Initiatives
Product Development
Sales & Marketing
E-commerce
Taxation
Legal
Audit & Compliance

Facts

Production

Development