|
Dynamics in GeneralThe GPS Dynamics.Commerce module provides a mechanism for tightly integrating SSCE-based Web sites with the GPS Dynamics CS+ accounting system. The following components are installed into the OPP: •The Dynamics Prospect and Shopper component adds Internet shoppers to Dynamics as prospects or customers and classifies them as Internet shoppers. •The Dynamics Item Price Adjust component retrieves and displays matrix pricing, based on attributes of the item defined in the Dynamics C/S+ Inventory Control module. •The Dynamics Order Price Adjust component calculates customer-specific prices and discounts based on customer-specific pricing set up in the Inventory Control module and assigned to the customer in Receivables Management. •The Dynamics Inventory Adjust component updates item stock status information as transactions occur. •The Dynamics Sales Tax component calculates sales taxes based on rates and schedules set up in the Receivables module, which in turn is based on the customer’s ship-to address. •The Order Accept component generates sales orders in a commerce-specific batch in the Sales Order Processing module, causing all appropriate database updates to occur. It also performs updates to General Ledger accounts to reflect payments made and delivery commitments. •The payment component verifies customer credit availability and writes it to the order. Furthermore, Dynamics.Commerce adds the ability to manage which items are available to Web shoppers, assign them to departments created in SSCE, enter item descriptions, and specify images for display. |
However, none of the systems ICS was evaluating offered integration with midrange, back-end accounting systems, despite the fact — and I’m sharing a personal bias here, having worked in the industry — that mid-range accounting software offers more than 80 percent of the functionality of leading ERP systems at 20 percent of the cost. These packages — from companies such as Great Plains Software (GPS) Inc., Epicor Software Corp., Walker Interactive Systems Inc., and Lawson Software — are the solutions of choice for the vast majority of companies with less than a billion dollars in annual sales. But the plethora of such solutions presents a big problem for e-commerce solution developers who want to target middle-market accounting products for integration. Until now, integration opportunities have been much greater at the high end, where much more money is available for customizing fewer targets: namely, SAP, Oracle, Baan, and PeopleSoft. The products ICS evaluated targeted these ERP systems for integration. But while ICS recognized that it was time to replace its character-based accounting system, it knew that it would find its most appropriate solutions in the midrange.
GPS has always been a leading developer of middle-market accounting software, and was one of the first companies in this category to deliver client/ server products. By fall 1997, ICS management was focusing on GPS as the leading alternative, partly because of its support for the Microsoft platform and commerce services. At the time, GPS was introducing products to support Web-based merchandising that were oriented toward business-to-consumer scenarios. The company was interested in business to business, however, and its willingness to customize its product to support ICS was a strong selling point. ICS also perceived an advantage in having its key vendor be a company of approximately equal size. (GPS revenues were well under $100 million annually in 1997; they have grown significantly since then.)
ICS Today
By December 1997, ICS had decided to implement GPS and follow its lead in building services around Microsoft’s commerce framework. Several considerations factored in this decision. First, GPS had an edge because of the company’s lead in integrating e-commerce with Dynamics, its well regarded mid-market accounting product. Dynamics was an NT-based product, and ICS was leaning toward an NT-based infrastructure and COM-based development model because a commodity marketplace supports them. The commodity nature of the NT/COM industry has several implications: Server hardware is relatively inexpensive and a variety of plug-compatible software is available for system administration and for extending application services. For example, ICS has obtained plug-in, COM-based software to perform tax and shipping cost calculations at relatively low cost.
Second, as a smaller company, ICS was a PC shop before starting its Internet initiative. It understood NT administration already and had skill sets in place for developing applications with tools such as Visual Basic and SQL Server. Finally, the company was comfortable with the idea of a variety of service providers (including GPS) supporting NT administration as well as COM-based development; certainly, the highly competitive marketplace for such services keeps costs at a relatively reasonable level.
Since January 1998, ICS has invested $1 million in GPS, ancillary products, and development work. Although ICS has persuaded GPS and other vendors to support evolving requirements by adding new features to their products, the company has nonetheless performed substantial customization. For example, all the external site design was custom work; seven of ICS’s 40 employees are developing applications on the platform using Microsoft Visual Interdev, Visual Basic, and Office; Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator, and Acrobat; and Visio. This investment is a relatively huge one representing two-thirds of the company’s net income. (ICS is privately held, so it’s rather free to make strategic investments.)
ICS has already realized two major advantages from its Microsoft- and GPS-based infrastructure. First, it gives the company the ability to create new Web-based companies in as few as 90 days. This capability triggered the second benefit: With a sound technology platform supporting a replicable business model, ICS is now in a position to introduce a series of new, vertically focused distribution businesses; it is currently adding NetLinkWeb.com, CableStoreUSA.com, and GovStoreUSA.com to its portfolio.
The site I described previously, InterLinkWeb.com, now distributes data communications products and supports some 2,000 resellers around the world. The site offers more than 100,000 pages of content about data networking products, and garners approximately 1 million page hits in 55,000 user sessions per month. Customers can determine product availability, obtain pricing consistent with their reseller status with ICS and the product vendor, place orders, review invoices and payables, and get shipment information. Furthermore, less-experienced users can receive suggestions about complementary and substitute products and assemble bundled products from predefined bill of materials lists.
For data communications equipment customers and other customers of goods with long shelf lives, ICS is making a market for used equipment. Thus, when a customer wants to upgrade, ICS takes care of the equipment being replaced, taking responsibility for picking up the goods and moving them to new homes. This effort is an international one, with ICS selling last-generation equipment in bulk into developing countries to such an extent that 22 percent of InterlinkWeb.com traffic is international, representing 57 countries. Although credit requirements prevent ICS from accepting international orders online because of credit requirements, international resellers can use the ICS site to find what they need, check product availability, or verify the status of a shipment. ICS is also considering enabling international resellers to enter orders online, flagging those orders, and routing them for special handling.
ICS is also leveraging its new infrastructure to manage customer accounts. The company no longer sends physical invoices or statements to online customers, which significantly reduces processing costs. Customers can view their account status online, and address customer service issues as well, at any time of the day. Goods enter the shipper’s system when they hit a loading dock; by integrating shipment status services provided by UPS, FedEx, and other vendors into its own system, ICS can assemble all information about order status into an integrated view. Taking this approach accelerates resolution of problems such as incorrect shipments, and has already benefited ICS and its suppliers by reducing the age of its accounts receivable by some five days.
ICS is taking advantage of new business-to-business relationships with its newer sites, CableStoreUSA and GovStoreUSA. For example, ICS has built links from CableStoreUSA to its marketing partners. As clients order products from CableStoreUSA, ICS tracks the origin of the referral and pays a percentage of margin to the marketing partner. Currently, these types of hyperlinks lead the client to the site’s home page rather than to a specific product page. GovStoreUSA will be a full-service provider of goods and services, brokering corporate-level pricing for more than 8,000 small municipalities, based on group buying power.
The Foundation
In conjunction with selecting GPS for its accounting and e-commerce integration solution, ICS also decided to build its client-focused Web applications on Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition (SSCE), and its integration strategy on Microsoft Commerce pipeline technologies. ICS was acting in accordance with a decision-making model that I used to proffer widely: Decide on an appropriate application suite first, then buy the infrastructure that runs the applications you need. The world is a much more complicated place now than it was when I used to suggest making decisions this way. In many ways, the choice of operating system platform is the most significant technology commitment ICS made — it determines architecture for each site, how the sites integrate with business services, and the relationship between the sites and the underlying operating system. With NT, application services are very close to the operating system, so by choosing a COM-based application model, you are making an operating system choice. In simple terms, ICS is betting on Windows NT and its successors as a deployment platform, and on COM and its successors as the binding layer for managing inter-application processes.
In addition to all the relatively “noisy” things that Microsoft does, the company has quietly become the leading supplier of application frameworks for a variety of distributed applications. GPS built its Dynamics.Commerce product (see sidebar, “Dynamics in General”) on SSCE’s order-processing pipeline (OPP) framework, which specifies how orders will be processed. SSCE’s store-fronting system is itself an extensible framework within which implementors can manage site style, promotions, registration mechanisms, and the metadata that describe product attributes. Merchandising applications built with SSCE execute as Active Server Pages (ASP) scripts that leverage services provided by special-purpose COM components, as necessary.
The OPP ensures that every order follows a specified sequence of events, each of which is represented by a pipeline component. The OPP interacts with a Commerce.OrderForm object, which stores information about an order, such as shipping address, payment information, and a list of products on the order. Each of these data elements is represented as a property of the Commerce. OrderForm object, and each pipeline component contains code that enforces a particular business rule on a Commerce.OrderForm object.
Each of SSCE’s three OPPs is divided into a series of stages:
1. The product pipeline components compute price and discounts on individual products.
2. Plan pipeline components calculate order totals, such as total amount owed, discounts, taxes, and shipping and handling charges. The plan pipeline is invoked whenever the shopper’s cart and other information about a pending order needs to be validated. A shopper can leave an order in any state and return to it later; to support this behavior, the plan pipeline must execute whenever a shopper opens an existing order to verify that the products that were ordered are still in stock.
3. Purchase pipeline components process payment information, store the committed order to the database, and generate a receipt. The purchase pipeline is invoked to finalize the sale, process the payment, and record the sales receipt.
During the installation process, SSCE creates a set of tables in a SQL Server database where the commerce site will maintain persistent data. Shopping cart data is stored in the basket table, which contains an image column that stores a serialized binary image of an uncommitted Commerce.OrderForm object. When the purchase pipeline “Accept” component saves an order, it writes the value of each of the object’s properties into a column in the table that has the same name as the property. Given this model, adding new properties to the OrderForm is easy; you simply assign them values in the script code and create corresponding columns in the table.
Both pipelines and pipeline components are implemented in SSCE as COM components with standardized interfaces. Any vendor or integrator can develop a component that implements the pipeline component interface and can be installed into a specified step in the pipeline. Many vendors, such as GPS, have done just that. In fact, ICS licensed a shipping and handling pipeline component from TanData Corp. and a credit card-processing component from ICVerify, and built its own tax-processing component. SSCE includes a graphical pipeline editor that simplifies installation of a third-party component into a pipeline: You simply select the component that you want to replace, choose install from the menu, and specify application parameters in the third-party component’s installation dialog.
ICS runs a surprisingly lean physical plant, considering how many sites it has in operation. Both the GPS suite and Microsoft SQL Server reside on a single Dell PowerEdge dual-Xeon processor server with 512MB RAM, RAID, and disk mirroring. (This system supports all three active sites.) ICS intends to add two more processors and up to 3.5MB RAM to that box as load increases. In addition, it has segregated IIS/SSCE, firewall, shipping, and credit-card transaction processing on separate servers. ICS maintains these systems at its primary business site, where it has installed gas-powered generators to circumvent power failures. Although ICS has not implemented any server failover (GPS accounting software doesn’t support failover yet either), it does keep enough equipment on hand to have a spare server available. (ICS plans to evaluate Windows 2000 after it is released with a full set of features and has a chance to stabilize.) The fact that ICS has experienced virtually no downtime implies the reliability of commodity equipment. Furthermore, its ability to serve large, but not huge, traffic volumes is a strong endorsement of the Windows NT, IIS/SSCE, SQL Server combination as an effective middle-market deployment platform.
Spreading the Wealth
ICS is a shining example that businesses in the middle market can take advantage of Web opportunities just as effectively as venture capital-backed startups or established multinational corporations. Perceiving the opportunity early — and designing a new business model that would exploit it — gave ICS a strong head start that enabled the company to become an early leader among vertical aggregators of products and services. That decisive action let ICS evaluate solution sets against the business model it wanted to achieve and gave the company an advantage over vendors that were themselves trying to determine the appropriate feature sets for their e-commerce offerings.
RESOURCESGreat Plains Software: www.greatplains.com ICVerify: www.icverify.com Microsoft: www.microsoft.com TanData: www.tandata.com |
Tom Spitzer (tspitzer@acm.org) is vice president of product management at EC Wise, which develops and enhances Web-based solutions through an object-oriented approach to usability. He was also a longtime columnist for DBMS magazine.
|
|
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
