AMR Research's most recent survey showed 46% of companies are considering or implementing their first service-oriented architecture (SOA) project within the next two years. (Dated starting of 2007)

AMR has a case study on SOA project at Schawk - a a $650M supplier and service provider to consumer product (CP) companies.

Schawk provides imaging services to branded companies around the world, including Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, Unilever, and 100 other Fortune 500 companies.

Business Need: to get products to market faster, customers have begun to ask Schawk to integrate with their systems. But today, Schawk relies on a distributed set of systems for design, production, and account management. CIO Jim Hanekamp realized that he needed to find a way to better integrate Schawk's internal systems as well as integrate with the systems of its customers. He said, "If we had to do it as a one-off for each of our systems and all of our clients, the effort would become unsustainable."

CIO asked Stephen Kaufman, VP of client strategy, to test using SOA and see if the technology was ready for a company like Schawk.

Timeline: 5 Weeks

Product: iWay Service Manager, an SOA integration product from Information Builders. iWay promised to keep project costs down because it offered out-of-the-box adapters for some of the unusual technology in Schawk's legacy systems.

BearingPoint(Choosen SI) and Schawk built not one, but three proof-of-concept integrations using SOA in the five weeks allocated for the project.

• The first integrated Blue, Schawk's commercially available packaging management application, with its production system, SchawkLink, to make it easy for Blue software customers to use Schawk production services.
• The second was a similar integration between a key customer's custom-developed packaging management software and SchawkLink.
• The third integrated SchawkLink with Schawk's customer management system to enable faster billing at project milestones.

The Data - Steven Kahn, the BearingPoint engagement manager, realized there was more to the solution than the technical components. "Looking at Schawk's requirements," Mr. Kahn told us, "we immediately saw there was a common factor among the candidate use cases for the prototype: the package design request data. So, one of our first priorities was to define a canonical form for that data in XML. After all, to be truly reusable, a service needs both to be universally accessible and return business relevant information."

The Mode - "We initially thought these services would be invoked as a push from the source systems to SchawkLink," Mr.Kahn continued. "Once we understood Schawk's business process better, we found that the services would need to be invoked as a pull. To accomplish this we rewired the process flows, but didn't have to change our transformations. Thanks to the flexibility of SOA and the iWay platform, we were able to change the process flows and meet Schawk's business needs in less than an hour."

Key lessons

• A small investment can have a big payoff. The proof of concept taught Schawk a great deal and galvanized support. "If we couldn't succeed in a small project," we were told, "what chance would we have with a big bang?"
• People are the critical element. The Project Manager can make or break the project. Executive support was crucial to Schawk's success. Getting support from the rest of IT takes time, but is critical because they control the access to systems and key infrastructure and application knowledge.
• SOA technology is the easy part. Understanding legacy systems and setting up the technical infrastructure were the key technical challenges. Defining standards for core business data is an important first step in designing services that are truly reusable.
• An SI partner can minimize ramp-up time, cost, and risk. When interviewing potential SIs, expect more than just an echo of your requirements. Demand project and technical details that meet your needs. Also look for team members with SOA skills and experience.

Source: 1

Tags: soa - bearing+point - cpg

Prashanth Rai