SCM [Supply Chain Management]: In today’s Internet economy of a billion connected computers and a trillion connected dollars, where outsourcing and subcontracting are the norm, a good information system must reach out beyond the four walls of the enterprise to the supplier and the supplier’s supplier on one end, and to the customer and the customer’s customer on the other. We adopt the SCOR (Supply Chain Operational Reference-model) methodology based of Supply Chain Council and use leading-edge SCOR-complaint tools such as the Process Wizard to analyze supply chains.

SAP NetWeaver: This new dimension technology incorporates SOA into the SAP architecture, introducing the Composite Application Framework and diverse application integration capabilities, including xApps, .NET and J2EE. SAP extends the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm to the business arena in the form of SOBA (Service Oriented Business Architecture), and already has business rules for 110+ countries encapsulated within 30,000+ web services that form the Service Layer of its Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA).

BPM [Business Process Management]: Our vision is to model the business processes and let automated tools take care of the underlying technology to support those processes, because good technology must be indistinguishable from the business processes. Our expertise in the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) methodology is worth noting in this regard, our European affiliate (ADA Software Group) being one of the only 19 companies worldwide to be certified by OMG as a FastStart Qualified Service Provider.

SOA [Service Oriented Architecture]: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the natural evolution of our long-standing concentration on Object technology and Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). SOA is integral to our BPM-centric approach. SOA and BPM are inextricably linked, with BPM providing the essential link between business and services. SOA now enables our mature component expertise to utilize SAP’s middleware to modularize clients’ systems and applications into discrete business components with well-defined interfaces, and then combine and recombine them in ways that meet clients’ needs within their SAP framework. With SOA, we supplant old enterprise application integration (EAI) techniques with the assistance of Web services standards. These standards simplify the creation and consumption of tasks through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and XML. Working with standard protocols eliminates much of the complexity of EAI, so companies can focus on improving their services instead of getting bogged down by integration difficulties.

mBusiness: We look beyond eBusiness into the world of mobile computing where business gets done, not only anytime, but anywhere too. That is the ultimate realization of the promise of the Internet Economy. It is the vision of a mobile universe embracing not only B2B and B2C, but also C2C and mCommerce/cCommerce through the mobilization of supply-chain on an omnipresent network that empowers everyone, from the supplier’s supplier to the customer’s customer.

This technology focus is supported by our broad based expertise in the SAP platform, including mySAP ERP, SCM, CRM, SRM, PLM, SEM and BI/BW.

GROUP STRENGTH

Worldwide, our group employs over 15,000 employees, and are a major employer of engineers and IT professionals.

The group has formidable IT competence based on legacy in software engineering, systems integration and data centers dating back to the late 70's. A global practitioner of Model Driven Architecture (MDA), we are a firm believer in Software Components and we endorse a Distributed/Collaborative Enterprise Architecture based on the Distributed Object Model. SOFTWARE BRICKS and COMPONENTS FACTORY are two of our initiatives to differentiate ourselves in components technology.

Our proficiency covers a significant spectrum of software engineering technology, with specialization in Distributed Object Computing, eCommerce, mCommerce and cCommerce. We are experienced in diverse & disparate applications, including eBusiness vortal development, CRM/ERP implementations and Data Acquisition & Control Systems for industrial automation.

We provide technology stimulation to Enterprise Solutions with our Business Process Driven Design and Model Driven Architecture supported by Component Based Software Engineering using the Software Factory approach.

Active in the world of Open Standards based Systems Integration and Interoperability, our participation in different standards bodies such as the Object Management Group (OMG), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) helps retain our position at the cutting-edge of technology.

Partnering with most major software vendors - such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sybase, Borland - and supported by offshore software factories in India and the Caribbean, we deliver business process driven approach, model driven architecture and component driven software development.

MODEL DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE (MDA)

With the “next big technology” always at the door, system architects face a daunting challenge and protect their investments and maximize flexibility by embracing hardware that implements open interconnection standards (like Ethernet and USB), and software that uses open interface standards (like RDBMS and XML).

MDA (Model Driven Architecture) solves this problem by addressing the complete life cycle of designing, deploying, integrating, and managing applications as well as data using open standards. It enables organizations to integrate whatever they already have in place with whatever they build today…and whatever they build tomorrow. It is built on the solid foundation of well-established standards such as Unified Modeling Language (the common modeling notation used and supported by every major company in the software industry), XML Metadata Interchange (the standard for storing and exchanging models using XML) and CORBA (the most popular open middleware standard).

MDA essentially separates the fundamental logic behind a specification from the specifics of the particular middleware that implements it.

MDA provides an open, vendor-neutral approach to the challenge of interoperability, building upon and leveraging the value of OMG's established modeling standards: Unified Modeling Language (UML); Meta-Object Facility (MOF); and Common Warehouse Meta-model (CWM). Platform-independent Application descriptions built using these modeling standards can be realized using any major open or proprietary platform, including CORBA, Java, .NET, XMI/XML, and Web-based platforms.

As new platforms and technologies emerge, MDA enables rapid development of new specifications that use them, streamlining the process of integration. In this way, MDA goes beyond middleware to provide a comprehensive, structured solution for application interoperability and portability into the future. Creating Application and Platform Descriptions in UML provides the added advantage of improving application quality and portability, while significantly reducing costs and time-to-market.

The architecture encompasses the full range of pervasive services already specified by OMG, including Directory Services, Event Handling, Persistence, Transactions, and Security. The core logic of many of these services is already available for multiple implementation technologies; for instance, Sun's J2EE platform uses Java interfaces to CORBA's long-established transactions and security services. MDA makes it easier and faster to design similar multiple-platform interfaces to common services.

Most importantly, MDA enables the creation of standardized Domain Models for specific vertical industries. These standardized models can be realized for multiple platforms now and in the future, easing multiple platform integration issues and protecting IT investments against the uncertainty of changing fashions in platform technology.

As global practitioners of Model Driven Architecture (MDA), ADA Software Group (our overseas affiliate) is one of very few worldwide MDA FastStart Qualified Service Providers certified by the Object Management Group (OMG).

SUPPLY-CHAIN OPERATIONS REFERENCE-MODEL (SCOR)

Looking beyond ERP into the domain of Supply Chain Management, we have adopted SCOR, which fits well with our process-driven approach to business and describes supply-chain using process building blocks, as our cross-industry standard diagnostic tool for implementing and measuring supply-chain success.

The Supply-Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR) is a process reference model that has been developed and endorsed by the Supply-Chain Council as the cross-industry standard diagnostic tool for supply-chain management. SCOR enables users to address, improve, and communicate supply-chain management practices within and between all interested parties.

It is primarily a management tool for supply-chain management, spanning all internal and external processes from order entry through paid invoice. It models the PLAN-SOURCE-MAKE-DELIVER paradigm that governs all supply chains and extends it from the supplier’s supplier to the customer’s customer.

The SCOR model involves five core management processes:

PLAN: Processes that balance aggregate demand and supply to develop a course of action which best meets sourcing, production and delivery requirements

SOURCE: Processes that procure goods and services to meet planned or
actual demand

MAKE: Processes that transform product to a finished state to meet planned or
actual demand

DELIVER: Processes that provide finished goods and services to meet planned or actual demand, typically including order management, transportation management, and
distribution management

RETURN: Processes associated with returning or receiving returned products for any reason. These processes extend into post-delivery customer support

The SCOR-model has been developed to describe the business activities associated with all phases of satisfying a customer’s demand. By describing supply chains using process building blocks, the Model can be used to describe supply chains that are very simple or very complex using a common set of definitions. As a result, disparate industries can be linked to describe the depth and breadth of virtually any supply chain. The Model has been able to successfully describe and provide a basis for supply chain improvement for global projects as well as site-specific projects.

SCOR is a process modeling tool that can be applied universally – anywhere that processes exist. It is even challenging the ISO standardization methodology as a better way of standardizing industry processes because SCOR implements metrices for continually evaluating the model’s performance.

SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (SOA)

As we build more and more software systems, we see similar situations and patterns appearing and reappearing over and over again. Naturally, it makes sense to reuse these commonly used functionality rather than building them from scratch every time we develop a new system. That is the rationale behind Object Technology.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the Object Technology paradigm extended to services, with some significant differences.

Borrowing from Hao He, let us look at an example of SOA that is likely to be found in your living room. “Take a CD for instance. If you want to play it, you put your CD into a CD player and the player plays it for you. The CD player offers a CD playing service. Which is nice because you can replace one CD player with another. You can play the same CD on a portable player or on your expensive stereo. They both offer the same CD playing service, but the quality of service is different.”

Reminiscent of the IBM advertisement that says, “Middleware is everywhere”, we now realize that SOA is everywhere, just as Object Technology is everywhere — as the basic building block of nature.

However, the SOA concept departs significantly from the Object Technology concept in separating the service and the service provider. Drawing on the CD player example, Object Technology would demand that every CD came with its own player, and that together, the CD and the Player became one object that responded to commands such as “play”, “pause” and “stop” from any external source.

If this sounds odd, brief reflection will reveal that this is indeed the way we build object-oriented software systems, because OO technology strongly suggests that we should bind data and its processing together.

SOA allows that separation and permits “loose coupling” based on real dependencies. Again Hao He provides as excellent example. “If you travel overseas on business, you know that you must bring power adapters along with you or your life will be miserable. The real dependency is that you need power; the artificial dependency is that your plug must fit into the local outlet.” We cannot remove artificial dependencies, but we can reduce them. If the artificial dependencies among systems have been reduced, ideally, to their minimum, we have achieved loose coupling.

The goal of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Both service provider and service consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners.

SOA achieves loose coupling among interacting software agents by employing two architectural constraints:

1) A small set of simple and easily available interfaces to all participating software agents are used. (As illustrated in the power adapter example, interfacing is fundamentally important. If interfaces do not work, systems do not work.)

2) Only generic semantics are encoded at the interfaces. (Since we have only a few generic interfaces available, we must express application-specific semantics in messages. We can send any kind of message over our interfaces, but there are a few rules to follow before we can call say that an architecture is service oriented.)

3) Only descriptive messages constrained by an extensible schema are delivered through the interfaces. The messages must be descriptive, rather than instructive, because the service provider is responsible for solving the problem. (Again, from Hao Hi: “This is like going to a restaurant: you tell your waiter what you would like to order and your preferences but you don't tell their cook how to cook your dish step by step.”)

The ultimate expression of a SOA is a Web Service, which – cutting through all the definitional debate within the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group – is a SOA that uses an Internet protocol (such as HTTP, FTP or SMTP) as its interface and transmits messages in XML format (apart from any binary data attachment).

In a SOAP Web Service, messages are carried by SOAP and the service description is in WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), while in a REST Web Service is an SOA based on the concept of "resource" (a resource being anything that has a URI – a uniform resource identifier) with HTTP being the only interface used.

Our deep understanding of and expertise in SOA enables us to take full advantage of the forward-looking SAP NetWeaver platform for the benefit of our clients.

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT (BPM)

Business processes are the key to an SOA’s long-term success and provide the greatest top-line value. BPM answers the question, “What can you do with a set of services?” Services do not manage themselves and run your business. Businesspeople need to decide how to use services to meet customer needs, fill orders, collect receivables, and dream up new products. Companies can better attain SOA’s full promised value of when they choreograph workflows into business processes.

As practitioners of OMG’s Model Driven Architecture, we effectively utilize SOA and BPM to create enterprise applications that are easier to build and easier to maintain. Future integration is much easier and less costly. Best of all, IT managers can now run more agile businesses, by putting together combinations of services that streamline workflow and adapt to changing conditions with ease.

SOA, BPM and MDA are the new world order.