CASE STUDY #1 – MARKETING COLLATERAL FOR IT FIRM (anonymized)
Background
Our client, a division of one of the top five brokerage firms in the U.S., is a leading provider of operations support and institutional trading services to investment managers. They recognized that traditional communications tools–mail, fax, and phone–could not meet the demands caused by the substantial growth in their customer base. Meanwhile, our client needed to deliver more services to attract new customers.
The solution: migrate routine communications to the internet to provide a more automated, real time, and collaborative system while at the same time freeing up the customer support staff.
Project Goals
Solution Architects Inc. was retained to assist with the design and development of a web-based Workflow Notification Service. Our client needed to generate notifications that their customers could view and respond to at a Web site.
The project’s primary goals were to improve operational efficiency, customer convenience, and quality of service. But nearly as important was to build a service that could easily be extended to other applications over time, with new types of notification added quickly, and new notification channels added as needed.
Design
The Workflow Notification Service provides a common mechanism to create, read, and respond to Web-based workflow notifications from multiple channels. It separates systems producing notifications from applications displaying them. This allows existing notifications to be modified or new notifications to be generated with little impact on the applications using them. It also provides a uniform visual display of the online notifications.
SolutionPath™ reusable components made up approximately 80 percent of the code.
Implementation took half the time required by the previous approach.
Web Based Workflow Notification Service – Functional Flow
Notifying channels include:
Java Applications
Database Triggers
Third-party Messaging
Standard File Transfers
Other channels as deployed
These channels feed through a layer of channel adapters into the following notification services:
Viewing Service
Response Service
History Service
Alert notifications created by this services layer then pass through another set of channel adapters to their designated destinations, including:
Web Browser Thick Client
Databases
Files
Message Queues
Other Notified Channels
Results
The benefits of the Workflow Notification Service are substantial.
Problems are now solved in minutes, not hours or days. For example, customers with insufficient funds are automatically notified immediately, allowing the customer to resolve the problem by the next morning (or sooner). Previously, a customer would be called the following morning, delaying resolution for at least a day.
Overall, the Workplace Notification Service simplifies communications with customers, while improving the quality, accuracy, and documentation of the communications. The service automatically generates the notices, preserving data integrity, yet the company controls the editing and final transmission. The robust and flexible architecture allows the client to easily add new messages or add wireless and other channels, increasing its customer service capabilities.
We believe that aiming technology at our advisor clients is not only a competitive advantage for [us] but also a key service strategy. The implementation of [the workflow notification service] illustrates this: It’s nice that we’ve reduced phone calls but what we’ve really done is given them more time for what’s really important – working with their clients – because now they can send and respond to alerts, or go to our Web site and perform very complex operations for their business, during off hours.” — Chief Operating Officer for Client’s Investment Manager Business
By reducing outbound phone calls to customers and eliminating some mailings, our client expects to save more than $4 million over five years while also radically improving customer service.
SolutionPath™
The Workflow Notification Service was designed and developed using the SolutionPath process, architecture, and reusable components. Using a Java Environment and a third-pary application server with O/R Mapping, JMS and XML Parser, the SolutionPath server and common services components were deployed with standardized workflow objects, services and data access along with customer specific code to create the Work-Flow Notification System.
To date, three applications have provided work-flow notification capability using the same business models, validation, database access, notification processing, visual display, and error-handling code used for the first application. This more efficient, layered design demonstrates Solution Architects’ years of experience in object-oriented design and development.
The net result: Since many components were already built, developers created much less new code and performed much less testing, speeding time-to-market and reducing development costs, while increasing quality.
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