• Canada (francais)

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Project Overview

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GiftCertificates.com (GCC) has filled the gift-giving needs of more than 1 Million consumers and businesses in all major industries by exploiting the agility that is afforded by operating via highly transactional e-business. However, as operations expanded they became a slave to their existing IT structure and decided to take the proper steps to move towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to maximize the flexibility of their IT structure and allow their business to remain competitive.  Before developing effective services, GCC understood that they first required a clear picture of their processes and all the application touch points.

The Challenge:

In order for them to continue growth while also improving services to their existing customers, they had to overcome the following challenges that were brought about by their dependency on an inflexible IT structure:

• Tightly coupled system
  • Workflow decentralized within applications
• Multiple platforms & languages (7 languages)
• Long recovery solutions
• Limited scalability options
• High maintenance costs
• Lack agility for a dynamic business

The Solution:

In order to implement a service architecture that would fulfill their application requirements, GCC launched a process documentation program that would implement the following solutions:

• Centralize workflow
  • Implement the ESB/BPM concept to control the flow of data through our system.
• Create a service based architecture
  • This will allow for reuse among Fulfillment, Customer Service, Transaction Security and Business Reporting applications.
• Single technology platform
  • Improve efficiency and reduce costs by consolidating to a single platform.

Project Stated Goals:

1. Map GCC's processes (initial plan 50 processes with 7-8 steps in each)
2. Model GCC's applications, with touch-points to processes
3. Document GCC's data entities with process and application touch-points
4. Document GCC's Business Rules and their implementation

Project Actual Results:

1. 341 processes mapped (averaging 4-5 steps each)
2. All of GCC's applications were identified; most of these entirely mapped/documented with data touch-points.
3. All process/application touch-points identified.
4. All of GCC's entities imported and managed in EPC
5. All of GCC's business rules organized and documented, with application touch-points

The Benefits of Choosing the Interfacing Technologies Services Team:

Ability to raise acceptance and interest in the toolset by the IT staff.

• They are ready to carry on with the documenting effort on their own.

Encouraging collaboration and project acceptance among business users

• Embraced the Goals, Methodology and Tools used during workshops
• Liked seeing their processes mapped and demonstrated in EPC.
• Project results helped most process owners go through the recent organizational changes having clarity of their own processes and required adaptation

Fostered a high level of involvement from several key resources who were ready to take ownership of their processes/functional areas.

• Managers have been asking about getting access to the process maps for their teams.
• Indication that it can be easily evolve to a sustainable and dynamic operational knowledge system for GCC.

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