Shiwa S. Fu

An intelligent event adaptation mechanism for business performance monitoring

Business performance monitoring is to observe, analyze, and possibly control the execution of business operations. Often in the information technology implementation environment, dynamic events are generated to indicate the states of the business processes. These isolated and heterogeneous low-level events create needs for adaptation and standardization, before the events can be handled by a central mediation engine, which fillers, sorts and correlates events into key performance indicators relating to business goals. In this paper, we propose an intelligent event adaptation mechanism for capturing, analyzing, enriching and transforming application-dependent IT-level events into a standard event format called the common base event. The resulting event adapter can capture and process low-level events and forward only business related events to the central mediation engine. We select the SAP system as a reference application, and illustrate the configuration issues between the application and its adapter. The architecture and functionality of the proposed event adaptation mechanism are explained with practical industry problems and scenarios

Solution Templates Tool for Enterprise Business Applications Integration

Todays enterprises must meet the rapidly changing market demands while collaborating with much broader range of trading partners to maximize supply chain efficiency and improve services to customers and their profit margin. To accomplish these business goals, their business application systems, such as enterprise ERP, must integrate and adapt rapidly to meet these business demands and collaborate with other business system without major reimplementation effort. Our proposed approach addresses these problems by using model based approach of creating reusable solution template that consists of off-the-shelf artifacts to be quickly assembled as a solution. In this paper, we introduce a solution template tool that simplifies the life cycle for creating an integration solution, through the flexible design and customization of solution templates, and an interactive environment driven by wizards. By providing levels of abstraction, the proposed tool allows users to compose templates of platform independent model without worrying about implementation details. The tool transforms the composed templates into platform specific IT execution model and a deployable solution, thus easing the task of solution integration lifecycle. A solution template of UCCnet illustrates our study.

Enterprise Telesales Opportunity Pipelines Performance Management

Enterprise telesales is most different from consumer sales by having a prolonged sales cycle, in weeks or months, in order to integrate various internal supports to validate and satisfy complex client demands and needs. Managers of such telesales centers are often challenged by the elaborate tasks of tracking the subtle progress of these pipelines of sales opportunities. Thus, an on-demand dashboard for the managers as well as the telesales representatives is a critical IT tool to address this unique problem. This paper provides insights into the business performance management (BPM), a technology used in business intelligence to enable users to observe, analyze, and act upon the information at the right time. To describe a sales cycle and the tracking needs, we start with a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a staged pipeline progression model. Based on business rules and threshold conditions for these KPIs, sets of business situations and alerts are generated for presentation. Finally, a hierarchical design is explained with drill-down capabilities for a typical reporting structure of a telesales center. The productivity of an IBM telesales center under such proactive management has been found to be six to seven times more cost effective than traditional field sales

An active adapter with edge cache approach for order status information integration

Sharing information among multiple business operations and distributed locations in an integrated manner has always been one of the central issues in business activity and process management. The effectiveness of the entire commerce value chain for an enterprise is largely dependent on the satisfaction of the information requesters. Improving upon the typical data federation approach, we propose to add data caches in the adapters that connect directly to the information requesters for fast data retrieval. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we have implemented the new active features for the IBM Websphere Business Integration middleware. Experimental results show that the active adapter approach significantly reduces the average data access time under a real order status tracking system.

A practical experience in workspace separation for developing multiple storefronts on customized commerce engines

In this paper, we describe our experience in separating workspaces, using the IBM VisualAge for Java development tool, for multiple web storefronts development for several major IBM public and private commerce sites. There was a need to create multiple workspaces since different storefronts may be developed at the same time. In addition, we wanted to keep the completed software packages for compatibility checking. Instead of tuning the current program setting to a desired mixed-version environment for each project, we generate a dedicated workspace by applying dependency analysis. New icons are created to conveniently invoke the development tool under different software packages and workspaces. We also present a systematic approach to facilitate the generation of a plan with instruction steps to produce new workspaces for their dedicated and required resources.