Business Environment

 The JG King Company is a multi-faceted housing construction organization that provides help to its clients in design, architecture, project development, manufacturing, logistics required in the construction of custom made residential homes. In order to sustain in the competitive industry the company has to manage business processes efficiently. For this the companyhas decided to develop and implement a web service that will be support its legacy system and an extension to it.  Using this web service the  employees of the local branches of the company will be able to update daily information about number of customers visited at that specific branch, number of customers provided their bank approval to start  the and all other pre-deposit communication between local branches and customers.

The following report contributes to the identification of the top level business processes, decomposition of the identified business processes into the primitive business activities in addition to that different services (entity-centric, task-centric, application services). Moreover this report also consists of different diagrams that describe the functionalities of the proposed web service.   

As the business environment is changing rapidly for the construction companies in Australia therefore it is important for JG King to adapt to the changing business conditions and customer demands as fast as possible. The available time to market for a new solution to cop  is up with the demands  is currently too much  high. The cost required to maintain the local systems for the organization to support the core business processes is high.  The present system of the company cannot adequately support the business processes and functionalities required to continue its routine operations. As the company is using legacy information systems to manage its business from the local offices thus there are serious concerns about the company’s ability to adapt with the changing scenario of the construction industry.  If the technological viewpoint is considered then it can be said that integrating the core business systems with newly developed applications is a complex process. In addition to that, the skill set that is needed to maintain the system is also a complex process.

The Service Oriented Architecture is an information system development approach used by the developers that helps in reduction of a proposed system’s functionality as a set or combination of multiple interoperable services for the organization. This set of services can be re-used in other separated systems in JG King.

After the analysis of the case study it can be said that, JG King requires a web service that will provide easier access to the customer data, account and project related information   that are scattered across the country and different lines-of-business processes.  Additionally JG King also wants ways to get the most out of its expansion initiatives through the adoption of the proposed web service, such as cross-selling of its services using different business channels, by enabling the customer and business insight regardless of system or application. The industry proven regulations that are depended on best practices and industry resources which is required to enable agile and efficient customer-centric business processes through the use of the new Web service.

Service Oriented Architecture

These business processes will be able to address the areas like the customer service, marketing, sales and risk reduction in its business to improve the revenue from the business.

Following are some of the identified business processes required for the proposed system of JG King.

  In this top level business process at first the customer contacts to the local office of the JG King to get an idea about a feasible design for his/her home by providing information about their land. In the next stage the customer selects the home design and visits that corresponding model home. After the design is selected the company analyzes the feasibility of the design as per the nature of the customers land.

Now, the company confirms the banks approval and asks the client to make a deposit at the local office. 

Effective vendor management needs combination of two different set of activities that have to be performed:  vendor management and procurement. Both the practices play a vital role in managing the vendors and ensuring the success of the long-term vendor relationships. On the other hand procurement manages selecting and sourcing the most eligible vendors for the business. Efficient vendor management helps in generating additional value from the vendors through effective management and analysis of their (vendors) performance. This process also enables the organization to act or plan against the vendors having performance issues or risks.

The procurement process of the organization of the construction company is a complex process and involves various amounts and degree of procurement for the projects undertaken. Several untouched and untrained areas exist in the procurement process of construction thus to address all this areas it is important for the organization to manage the other related process.

 The Accounting process in any organization is a systematic and continuous process. It starts with the analysis of the different business transactions and completes with the completion and verification of the post-closing trial balance (Colombo, Mendes and Bepperling 2015). This process is presumed to be process that run for an indefinite period in the business organization. This time period is divided into small segments in order to determine the operating results for the organization and financial position in the market by comparing it with previous results. In the similar manner the accounting process of the JG King is also a continuously iterating process in order to determine financial results for the organization. 

CRM (Customer relationship management) process has the potential to support JG King Company to achieve its business goals and growth of its business. In today’s competitive business environment and rapid technological development it becomes important for the organization to efficiently manage the relationship with its customers. CRM enables organizations to understand their customers in order to provide better services to them (Vasista and AlSudairi 2013). However, CRM is considered as the technical and complex word and it is not understood well by the organization. Thus in order to make it an efficient process, it is important to incorporate the main components of CRM which are technology, people, and other business processes.

Top-level Business Processes

Decomposition of the Designing and approval process

In this process at first the customer contacts with the local office of the JG King and provides the information about the land they have.

In the next steps some suitable design for the proposed home is provided to the customer and they accept one of them.

Now the feasibility of the design on the land is decided.

In the next step the company clarifies the banks approval.

After the banks clarification the customers is asked to deposit to the local branch of JG King.

Decomposition of the vendor management process

 At first EOI (expression of interest) are asked from the vendors.

After this the organization will sort the vendor for its required products.

The system will be regularly update the vendor information for any new EOI or change in the present purchases (Vasista and AlSudairi 2013). 

This process is also connected with the accounting and financial process.

After the EOI is collected from different vendors it sorts out the most suitable vendor for the business.

After the vendor is finalized the accounting department issues purchase orders for required raw materials.

When the materials are delivered the vendor invoice is sent to this accounts payable process.   

At firsts it is determined that what is to be procured and for which process.

Then this process makes a financial estimates for the proposed procurement.

Next the procurement process is initiated by business personnel of the organization. 

After the customer provides information about the land they have the company provides some suitable designs.

If the designs are not selected by the customer this process continuously communicate about their specific needs for the proposed home.

When the design is approved this process will notify the customer about it.

Next this process confirms the deposit from the customer to start the construction of the house.

A task centric service is a type of business administration with a useful setting in light of a particular business process. Accordingly, the task centric services are not by and large viewed as rationalist and subsequently have less reuse potential than other service models (Vasista and AlSudairi 2013). By considering the deliberation of single-reason or business process particular rationale into task centric services, the chance to expand the amount of agnostic logic inside administrations in view of substance and utility administration models is made strides.

 In this give scenario the approval of the design of the house of the customer, processing of the deposit by the customer to the local office are considered as task centric services. 

Decomposition of Business Processes

The entity centric   services are   in charge of handling business rationale. Continuously participate in automation of different business procedures. May need to form different administrations to do its capabilities. Conventions need to stretch out to information portrayal of business and setting data conveyed by messages to guarantee consistent interoperability.

While designing and developing the web service for JK King the most critical and as a rule additionally the initial phase is to distinguish the principle business process logics and the sort of association between the procedures and other unique business administrations required keeping in mind the end goal to accomplish the new capacities for the organization (Gonen et al. 2015). SOA gives the perfect level of reflection for characterizing reusable business usefulness, totally epitomizing hidden applications and innovation stages from the total application framework.

SOA produces measured business segments that exemplify business rationale and for the most part acknowledged interfaces. The modules can without much of a stretch execute the means in a procedure stream.

The composite services like the procurement process and vendor management process is managed and controlled by other several services of the organization. An administration with either synthesis or accumulation of different administrations (Colombo, Mendes and Bepperling 2015). The interior summons are disconnected from the customer giving a bound together see. An arrangement would help composite services to be synchronous in nature and choreography would help composite administration to be asynchronous.  

 In developing the web service, the service composition ensures the automation of different business processes and incorporation of different predefined business rules required in workflows. Therefore when the services are collected into an ordered set of consistent functionality, they develop a composite application that solves some certain business needs of the organization (Bozkurt, Harman and Hassoun 2013).  The composite application can be defined as the application element built by merging multiple services within a service-oriented architecture. 

 Like for the vendor management process, a dedicated portal will act as an entry dashboard where vendor details will be entered by the officials at the different local offices. These details will be immediately captured and the sorted vendor data is created in the Master Data Management System of the proposed web service (Cheng and Hancke 2015).  This database will act as the master repository of all vendor details. These vendor details are then pushed into the Core System and Vendor Management System as appropriate based on predefined rules. If necessary, the approval of the design and the approval tasks are raised and will be handled automatically by this web service. 

Task-Centric Services

This layer of the proposed service consists of existing in-house application usually known as the legacy systems compared to the proposed system in the organization, this legacy system also includes the existing CRM system and resource management package, business intelligence systems as well as different object-oriented system implementations (Cheng and Hancke 2015). The complex layered architecture of a proposed SOA web service is able to influence the existing legacy systems of JG King  if they are integrated by using the service-oriented integration techniques. 

This specific layer consists of different enterprise components which are mainly responsible for actualizing the functionalities and maintenance of the different services that are exposed through it. These components are managed, governed by a set of enterprise assets. This assets are funded at business unit level or at the enterprise level (Gonen et al. 2015). This component layer also contains the Technical and Functional Components that enable a Service Component in the proposed service in order to realize one or more services for the end users at the different local offices of JG King.  The service components replicate the definition of the different services they characterize, in terms of QoS and functionality.  The component layer usually uses container-based technologies such as application servers in order to implement different enterprise components and to ensure efficient workload management, high-availability of the services  and load balancing.

The services which the organization supports and wants to expose to the users, resides in this service layer. They can be found or be statically bound and after that conjured, or perhaps, choreographed into a composite administration. This layer likewise accommodates the component to take endeavor scale parts, specialty unit particular segments, and at times, project specific segments, and externalizes a subset of their interfaces as service depictions (Jabbar, Kumar and Samreen 2015). In this manner, the undertaking parts give benefit acknowledgment at runtime utilizing the usefulness gave by their interfaces. 

Despite the fact that this layer is more often than not out of scope for exchanges around a SOA, it is step by step winding up plainly more significant. It is described on the grounds that there is an expanding union of norms, for example, Web Services for Remote Portlets Version 2.0 and different advancements, which look for to use Web administrations at the application level or introduction level (Colombo, Mendes and Bepperling 2015). It can be considered as a future layer that have to consider for future arrangements. It is likewise essential to note that SOA decouples the UI from the segments, and that user at last need to give a conclusion to-end arrangement from a get to channel to an administration or piece of services.

Entity-Centric Services

Conclusion

The JG King Company requires a system in order to increase efficiency and profit from the business due to the globalized and competitive business environment. Changing business environment also asks for flexible and prompt responses against certain scenarios such as increasing value of elusive assets of the organization, establishing management strategies to improve the business performance as well as collecting, measuring and analyzing real-time data. Specific approaches are also required to achieve realistic, organized and rational management in between the accelerating and constant changes in the business environment of construction industry.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) idea depends on the rule of creating reusable business services and building applications as opposed to building solid applications. SOA should not be considered as an item. It is about crossing over any barrier amongst business and IT through an arrangement of business-aligned IT administrations utilizing an arrangement of plan standards, examples, and strategies. In a SOA, assets are made accessible to members in a value chain, project, or line of business – spreading over numerous applications inside an endeavor or over various undertakings. It comprises of an arrangement of business-adjusted IT benefits that by and large satisfy business procedures and objectives of JK King. 

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