With e-commerce initiatives, businesses need to provide their customers with real-time access to information-rich data located in back-end, transaction-oriented (production) systems. "Companies can have the fastest Web facilities in the world but when a customer asks for information, sooner or later they are going to need to access their production systems to obtain the right answer," says Marc Scheepbouwer, marketing director of Global Technology Business Intelligence (GBI), a company in the JSE listed Global Technology Group which specialises in the provision of business intelligence services and solutions to the local and international business community. "But these systems may not be able to sustain the real time throughput demands, and when systems cannot keep pace, customers may just go elsewhere.
"One responsible solution is to create a new database containing the information that companies want their customers to access. The key, however, to implementing a separate database for customer Web access, is to keep this database consistent with backend systems. This is more difficult than it appears to be."
Scheepbouwer says another potential solution could be to use enterprise application integration (EAI) methods to cache customer-facing data in a database optimised for Web access. Any customer transaction that comes in over the Web in the database can be captured and pushed to the appropriate back-end production system.
This is difficult to do with just EAI - as EAI alone does not address the response-time problem of the production system being too slow. It requires a sophisticated design of cache data and combined application logic.
A better solution is data integration which not only answers the need for freeing and moving `heavy` ERP data, but also provides unparalleled richness when it comes to e-business collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers, maintains Scheepbouwer.
"There are now new `shrink-wrapped` data-integration solutions on the market, which supplied alongside a custom data platform, allow companies to successfully integrate and access data effectively. These can be implemented in a matter of days rather than months". He says the concept of the pre-packaged data cache, for example, offers the ability to extract data from ERP applications, clean and transform it, and put it where it`s accessible to employees, partners, and customers. Furthermore, the packaged applications are customisable, allowing companies to integrate additional data from the back office, incorporate information from other operational systems, and load external data.
`By unlocking large amounts of real-time and historical ERP data, data caching provides customers, suppliers, and business partners with detailed information on product ordering, delivery, and order status. Caching also prevents back-end systems from becoming bogged down by frequent Web requests, an often overlooked element of ERP data warehousing."
Pre-packaged caching applications integrate with many of the leading e-commerce and analytic applications from Oracle, People Soft, and SAP, and support operational areas such as human resources, plant maintenance, and sales and distribution.
"The concept of packaged data integration is surely `caching` on as word about its ease of implementation increases. It`s as natural an evolution of the market as ERP`s evolution from custom implementations to out-of-the-box systems," says Scheepbouwer.
He advises that GBI offers a pre-packaged data integration solution in the form of Acta Technology`s eCache. "eCache is designed to maintain a database (which it calls a cache) suitable for e-commerce or for heavy query access, keeping the database current via a user-specified combination of real-time or batch updates from multiple back-end applications and databases and, where it makes business sense, from data entered by the users.
"The purpose is to sustain a workload of queries or `heavy` e-commerce data access that would, without Acta, cause performance problems in the back-end systems. In addition, eCache is designed to be tailored by the user so that it will become not just a technical, performance-oriented solution but a business solution, integrating and reformatting the data to make it suitable for customers," Scheepbouwer adds.
Share
