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 to a mid-sized company while maintaining the same processes and systems throughout its growth. 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 issues. 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, taking a toll on the company's revenue. The impact is hard to measure. Additionally, the amount of manually entered data resulted in delays and processing inefficiencies.
Due to the increased revenue impact and reduced efficiencies within implementing organizations, 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 diagram 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. The order system needs to be directly linked to the implementation tracking system. The system requires security to prevent orders from leaving the system without being processed. Accuracy is required to ensure accurate billing and correct order fulfillment. The system needs to minimize internal costs. So, to achieve that, you need to create a system quickly, but the system must be fully functional.
While a good order entry and tracking system can help reduce costs, it does not generate revenue by itself.
Go deeper into the structure
Before starting pattern design, there are some basic architectural issues that need to be addressed. The first underlying technical requirement is that the system must be configurable without additional coding. Essentially, this means that the work needs to be embedded into the database, rather than hard-coded in interpretation/processing code. Second, the database needs to contain enough information to be able to represent the major (and changeable) aspects of the order entry interface and implement processing.
In the process of trying to solve the above problems, the system gradually fit into two parts - order entry and order tracking, and provided a clearly defined link between the two. The order entry system needs to know how to represent the order with accurate product codes, discounts, and pricing terms. An order fulfillment system needs to know how to track various types of tasks, related jobs, and various departments to process and record each order. Finally, orders need to be converted into implementation jobs on a regular and predictable basis. The figure below shows the structure of the new system as it currently exists.
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