SOA solution for Retail Chain Industry

Problems facing the Retail Chain Industry

 

1. The store is aging and the marketing method is lagging behind.

2. The management mode is not scientific. Chinese retail enterprises did not have a complete scientific management and evaluation system when they started out, and they did not learn to establish it during the development of enterprises. There is a lack of appropriate approaches and reasonable methods to attract and cultivate talents, leading to a vicious circle.

3. The management philosophy is aging. Many successful retail enterprises have started from scratch in the last 15 years. They have never understood retail and rely on the accumulation of practice and experience. However, these experiences have been accumulated in the context of specific and successful opportunities, and many rules are out of date. In a series of new environments, such as new technologies, electronic circulation, and virtual economy, how can we grasp business opportunities and precisely position our own markets, this requires professional knowledge and teams to conduct a large number of market research and rational analysis, rather than "speaking in a word" and "feeling positioning ". However, retail enterprises in China are mostly in the old management concepts and nonstandard management teams.

4. It planning and construction lags behind. It has become the most important asset of enterprises in modern enterprises, but there are still a lot of it gaps in the retail chain industry, lack of effective professional systems to support enterprise operations. In the end, enterprises lack the ability to respond quickly and their competitiveness decreases rapidly.

 

Solution

 

1. Use diversified marketing methods to transform stores, integrate various electronic channels with physical stores, and introduce "experiential marketing" to further create brands and create first-class customer experience and services.

2. gradually introduce advanced management models, and establish a scientific performance system while creating a healthy corporate culture. In the end, quantitative evaluation is used as the basis to create a fair and equitable competition environment, improve the company cohesion, and attract high-end talents.

3. the modernization of management as the life of the company's development, gradually changing the concept of personal experience-based management, and establishing a modern management system based on data and with an institutionalized process as the skeleton. This reduces the operational risks of enterprises.

4. Build an IT architecture based on SOA to achieve a multi-level, loosely coupled, highly flexible IT architecture. Gradually establish applications at all levels as needed to quickly adapt to and promote the company's urgent changing business and management needs. In this way, enterprises can truly achieve "customer-centric ".

 

Overall Architecture

 

 

SOA-based retail chain solutions are divided into four layers based on business lines, it can be divided into channel layer, marketing management layer, core product layer and management control layer from the outside to the inside. Vertically, the business layer, integration layer, and infrastructure layer are divided by technical layer, and the interconnection between business systems is achieved through the integration layer, IT systems are built into an organic whole through standard construction.

 

Channel Layer

 

The channel layer contains all the sales methods for customer terminals. Driven by modern technology, the diversification of marketing methods has become an inevitable trend. Each time an enterprise adds a marketing channel, it will obtain more customers or better retain some customers, channel layer construction reflects an enterprise's understanding and importance of "customer-centric.

 

Marketing Management

 

On the basis of the channel layer, the marketing management layer provides customers with more professional services and better experience through more in-depth analysis of data.

 

CRM Customer Information Management

 

Customer Information Management should not only provide complete and unified customer information (ecif) required by other systems, but also provide evaluation of customer classification, clustering, relevance and loyalty, this provides a data basis for providing high-quality classified and differentiated services.

 

Channel Integration

 

Channel integration can provide customers with high-quality customer experience. The purchase behaviors generated by customers in any channel are pushed to different channels, so that customers can effectively take advantage of the advantages of different channels, the best shopping path and shopping experience are formed to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

 

Marketing and Sales

 

Through the Association Analysis of customer behaviors and sales situations, we can quickly make marketing and marketing responses and deliver advertisements, new products, and promotion methods at the right time. Through the centralized operation center, you can handle professional services that are difficult to handle in stores and channels, arrange differentiated experience activities for key customers, and monitor the behavior of store shopping guides, this reduces the requirements for first-line store business personnel and provides unified and standardized services.

The operations center shall provide the following services:

1. shared resource services, including but not limited to: finance, human resources, IT support and other services.

2. Resource Scheduling Service, including but not limited to: Logistics and warehousing.

3. Remote Training Services, including but not limited to: shopping guide training and IT technology training

 

Core Product Layer

 

The core product layer is the realization of enterprises' core competitiveness, including product line design, product service design, product delivery management, supply and marketing and accounting management.

 

Management Control Layer

 

The management control layer mainly implements internal management of the company, including three aspects: people and property. For Large-Scale Enterprises, risk management and financial supervision compliance systems need to be introduced.

 

Enterprise Service Bus

 

The Enterprise Service Bus can effectively integrate the company's existing application systems in the form of services. It is an integrated and service-oriented architecture. It provides a basic platform for future application systems based on the loosely coupled and reusable technical features. The Enterprise Service Bus provides open architecture, high reliability, high scalability, complete interfaces, non-invasive features, and is an intermediary for intelligent integration and management of various enterprise services, to share information between integrated enterprise applications. In Gartner's report, ESB is hailed as the "heart" of SOA ".

The role of the Enterprise Service Bus in the SOA reference architecture is as follows:

1. Use integration technology to connect various application systems of enterprises so that systems can access each other through services;

2. Introduce intermediate layers to achieve a reasonable application hierarchy, so as to achieve loose coupling and global sharing;

3. Provides service interface specifications for various businesses and horizontal service access standards between different business lines to provide independent expansion space for various business applications.

4. the ESB-based service-oriented application architecture allows the business system to adopt the most suitable technologies and products based on actual business requirements and build independently according to the business development plan in stages;

The function structure of the enterprise service bus consists of the following parts:

ESB Function Structure

The product features can be divided into six levels:

1. Bus basic service framework, which provides basic technical means such as consistency guarantee and security for the enterprise service bus. Based on the actual characteristics of enterprise integrated applications, guarantees performance, reliability, and scalability.

2. Integrated Services: provides basic integration services such as communication connection, message conversion, service routing, service scheduling, service level, and exception handling; provides a variety of integration service modes, such as standard service mode and Service proxy, to address the characteristics of various integration requirements, as well as services at the application level such as cross-system flow query; on this basis, service encapsulation, reuse, Service combination, and service scheduling are supported.

3. Public services: provides built-in multi-public services, including channel authentication services, service version management, traffic control, service control and fault isolation, support for file attachments, asynchronous flow and unified flow number, Log service, transaction consistency, penetration and other public services.

4. Service management and service standards, provide a collection of front-end tools for service configuration management, and provide Industry Service specification standards.

5. System Monitoring: provides multi-angle system monitoring functions, including monitoring of real-time transaction traffic, response time, and other indicators. You can customize the relevant monitoring parameters, generate the required transaction report information.

6. The security system provides multiple security mechanisms, including message security transmission of ESB, permission management for service access, and multiple authentication methods. It also supports effective integration with third-party security systems, it provides an effective security monitoring mechanism to track and analyze transaction log information.

 

Data Integration Platform

 

In enterprises, due to the development time or different development departments, there are often multiple heterogeneous information systems running on different software and hardware platforms simultaneously, the data sources of these systems are independent and mutually closed, making it difficult to share and integrate data, thus forming a "data island ". The data integration platform logically or physically aggregates data of different sources, formats, and characteristics to provide comprehensive data sharing for enterprises. In the field of enterprise data integration, many mature frameworks are available. ETL and data warehouse are usually used to construct a data integration platform.

A data warehouse is like: "A food warehouse stores a large amount of food and is allocated to different types of food warehouses (Data marketplaces) for access or purchase. It is widely used in data management of large and medium-sized enterprises ." ETL: Abbreviation of extract-transform-load. It refers to the process of data extraction (extract), transformation (Transform), and load. The ETL system of the data warehouse is a main tool in the data sorting stage in the data warehouse. It is combined with metadata management to provide data extraction, conversion, and cleaning for different data sources, load the function.

 

 

ETL mainly completes the following tasks:

1. Data Extraction: a large number of original systems and applications exist in enterprises, involving ERP, CRM, financial management, and other aspects. The data extraction function must be able to extract data from various data sources with different structures and forms.

2. Data Transformation: Data extracted from different sources must be converted according to specific rules of the enterprise to serve specific services such as statistics and analysis.

3. Data cleaning: enterprise data often has a large number of quality problems, from inconsistency of simple data formats, incorrect data input, incomplete data to relatively complex data inconsistency. Obviously, data quality will directly affect the quality of information services based on the data. The goal of data cleansing is to improve data quality in terms of accuracy, consistency, non-redundancy, and application requirements.

4. Data Loading: load the extracted, converted, and cleaned data to the Data Warehouse correctly. Monitoring and management: supervises and manages the process of data processing (such as ETL time schedule and Error Tracking) to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of the entire ETL process.

SOA solution for Retail Chain Industry