FAST-MOVING RETAILER KEEPS GROWING WITH MORE FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE
Fast is the name of the game in consumer goods retailingespecially for Massdiscounters
. Facing growing competition, expansion opportunities and an increasingly complex supply chain, the retailer needed to increase its agility.By evolving to a more flexible architecture, Massdiscounters can now respond rapidly to changing business needs.
The core retail system Massdiscounters built 25 years ago still helps track sales, buy and manage stock as well as receive and price products. Called POM (it was first created for Purchase Order Management) the mainframe-based system has proved worth holding onto, according to IT Executive Anton Groom.
Massdiscounters has leveraged the core value of POM in a Service Oriented Architecture. Historically, no other system talked directly to the mainframe. Only batch integration was used. That's all changed with an SOA. Now it's routine for a mainframe app to call an external Web service, get information back and then continue on with a process.
Making the complex simpler
"It wasn't until we got to the point in the mid-2000s when we realized we had created an extremely complex enterprise architecture," Groom said. "We realized we needed to simplify things a bit for ourselves, and one of the things we did was standardize all of our integration and we made a conscious effort to eliminate all other integration tools out of the business. That was very efficient for us."
Using a standards-based integration platform, all the company's Web services, JMS messaging, packaged and custom apps as well as legacy systems can communicate efficiently in an SOA.
Changes are now much faster. Groom recalled one project that took just three weeks instead of an anticipated three to six monthsall thanks to moving away from"spaghetti architecture" of point-to-point connections.
"What we're really seeing is reduction in the complexity," Groom said. "For example, there were over 250 different subprograms that made calls to our stock file, which meant that every time we wanted to make a change to the stock file, it would mean that a developer would have to look at all 250 of those subprograms and determine if the change he was making into their data structure had to be changed, and that was extremely time consuming.
"By going to services, we now have a stock service, that's the only program that makes any changes to that stock data file. So when the data file changes, you only have to change it in one place you don't have to worry about the rest of the application."
Groom advises using SOA Governance for any company going down a services path. "I would recommend that they get (governance) early on, and make sure that they focus on changing the process and educating the people, so that it can be implemented properly."
Using CentraSite, Massdiscounters can re-use its services effectively to speed new innovations to market. Additionally, changes can be tracked and managed. Usage patterns can be monitored.
FAST-MOVING RETAILER KEEPS GROWING WITH MORE FLEXIBLE ARCHITECTURE
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