For a company driven primarily by a receivables business model, one of the core business functions is entering, tracking, and recording orders. Companies that excel at this can scale their organizations and increase their profits without running into infrastructure constraints. When order processing is cumbersome, error-prone, or inconsistent, companies suffer financially from direct costs and reduced productivity.
At my company, Myers Internet, the core business priorities revolve around building a customer base, providing ongoing service to Myers and helping it resolve customer issues as they arise. Companies are using many different systems to handle various aspects of the order entry and fulfillment cycle. These systems are neither integrated with each other nor have mechanisms to ensure that every order is correctly accounted for.
Myers Order Tracking System (MOTS)
Like many other organizations, Myers grew from a small company to a mid-sized company throughout its growth The same processes and systems have always been retained. When most of these processes were established, all transactions were done manually through email, paper records, and site visits. Five or six years ago, an engineer at Myers put together a system to track order fulfillment using Allaire's Cold Fusion and a Microsoft SQL Server database. The system, called MOTS (Myers Order Tracking System), allowed the sales and accounts management departments to Orders are entered and then implemented by support, engineering, design, information systems, and accounting departments. While this system is an important step forward, it still leaves many manual steps and is not integrated with any other business systems.
Around the same time, a system was also created in which customers and sales representatives could order products online from the Myers website. This system can create new Web sites and calculate the total installation and recurring costs for the provided Web site packages. It then sends emails to various departments, who can enter orders into MOTS and create billing information in the accounts management system.
Architectural Barriers
This type of architecture suffers from several system problems. At Myers, one of the more glaring issues included the manual data entry required to initiate order tracking, and the errors that occurred as a result of this manual process. Another problem is the disconnect between the order entry, order tracking and billing systems in the company, lost orders, omitted information and the errors they result in.
Another problem that only occurs occasionally is that the MOTS system itself is inherently flawed. Because of the way MOTS is written, it is possible to enter orders with no or missing department assignment information. When this happens, the order will eventually be lost in the system. When orders are lost, accurate and timely accounting is harder to achieve.
As the business grows, flaws in the architecture become more and more apparent, and as the number of customers and orders increases, lost and incorrectly entered orders occur with increasing frequency, giving The impact on company revenue is hard to measure. Additionally, the amount of manually entered data resulted in delays and processing inefficiencies.
Due to the increased impact on revenue and reduced efficiency within the implementing agency, it became clear that a replacement system was necessary to tie everything together and increase efficiency and reduce error rates. The old system is shown below.
Figure 1: Old system architecture
This figure shows all areas that require manual data entry . Since none of these systems are integrated, the potential for data loss or distortion is very high. The big-picture needs immediately became apparent. 1
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