Modeling a CRM system with an EAI* framework

FRANCISCA LOSAVIO ¹, DINARLE ORTEGA ², MARÍA PÉREZ ³, MARTHA GONZÁLEZ ⁴

¹ Centro ISYS, LaTecS, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, flosav@cantv.net

² Departamento de Computación, Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela, dinarleortega@yahoo.es

³ Departamento de Procesos y Sistemas, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela, movalles@usb.ve

⁴ Université de Versailles, Versailles, France, martha.gonzalez@prism.uvsq.fr

ABSTRACT

Some Enterprise Architectures and Information Systems frameworks can be used to model different aspects of Enterprise Application Integration  EAI). Considering several of these frameworks and in particular the approaches proposed by the Brown’s Conceptual Model of Integration and the Integration Views of Sandoe, we have defined an EAI Framework (EAIF), expressed as a standard UML model. Its main contributions are on one hand, to unify concepts and terminology related to integration aspects and on the other hand to model the main features related with processes, services, mechanisms and people involved in business integration. Moreover, EAIF can be used within the enterprise to help integration project managers. The main goals of this work are: - present the EAIF specification, which complements the standard UML model, and - experiment the modeling of the processes, services, mechanisms and people of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system using the specification to  llustrate the EAIF instantiation process. The application to the case study allowed the detection of inconsistencies in the definition of some of the CRM integration processes and the corresponding services suggesting changes in business strategies.

Keywords: EAI, EAIF, EA, frameworks, CRM, IS.

RESUMEN

MODELADO DE UN SISTEMA CRM UTILIZANDO UN FRAMEWORK PARA EAI

Algunos frameworks o plataformas genéricas de las Arquitecturas Empresariales (en inglés EA: Enterprise Architecture) y Sistemas de Información (en inglés IS: Information Systems) se pueden utilizar para modelar diferentes aspectos de laEAI (en inglés EAI: Enterprise Application Integration). Considerando varios de estos frameworks y en particular los enfoques propuestos por el Modelo Conceptual de Integración de Brown y las vistas de integración de Sandoe, se ha definido el Framework de Integración de Aplicaciones Empresariales (EAIF), expresado como un modelo estándar de UML (en inglés UML: Unified Modeling Languaje). La principal contribución de EAIF por una parte, es unificar los conceptos y la terminología relacionada con los procesos de integración y por otra parte, modelar los principales aspectos relacionados con los Procesos, Servicios, Mecanismos y las Personas involucradas en la integración de negocios. Más aún, EAIF puede orientar a los gerentes de un proyecto de investigación en identificar la ausencia de elementos importantes dentro de éste. Los objetivos principales de este trabajo son: presentar la especificación de EAIF, la cual complementa el modelo de UML, y experimentar la modelación de los procesos, servicios, mecanismos y personas de un sistema CRM (en nglés CRM: Customer Relationship Management) a través de la instanciación de la especificación. El estudio de caso permitió la detección de las inconsistencias en la definición de algunos de los procesos de integración de CRM y los servicios correspondientes que sugieren cambios en las estrategias de negocio.

Palabras claves: EAI, EAIF, EA, frameworks, CRM, IS.

Recibido: julio de 2005  Revisado: agosto de 2006

INTRODUCTION

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is defined as the process of coordinating and synchronizing multiple heterogeneous software applications (Serain, 2001). Enterprise Systems (ES) are proposed as integrated Information Systems (IS), covering most of the enterprise business processes (Sandoe, 2001). IS frameworks and Enterprise Architectures (EA) for modeling business processes can be used to model different aspects of EAI. Considering several of these frameworks, which have been extensively compared in (Losavio et al., 2005) and in
particular the integration approaches proposed by the Brown’s Conceptual Model of Integration (BCMI) (Brown et al., 1994) and the Integration Views of Sandoe (Sandoe, 2001), we have defined a business integration framework, the EAI Framework (EAIF), expressed as a standard UML (Unified Modeling Language) model (OMG, 2003)

 EAIF can be considered an integration-oriented EA framework, since it models processes, services and mechanisms for ES. The term framework means in general a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality (O’Rourke et al., 2003). The main contributions of EAIF are to unify the EAI terminology using the UML standard and to provide support to detect inconsistencies in the definition of integration processes, the services adapted to these processes and the mechanisms implementing these services.

The main goals of this work are on one hand to present the EAIF textual specification and instantiation guidelines and on the other hand, to experiment the modeling of a CRM system instantiating the EAIF specification. The case study is a J2EE-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System, called J-énesis, for customer retention and loyalty. It follows an upward/forward process within a training organization and provides forward services (Acuña &Rodriguez, 2003).

This paper is structured as follows, besides this introduction and the conclusions: Section 2 presents the EAIF overview and specification. Section 3 describes the case study and its instantiation.

EAIF

EAIF is a business integration framework specified in UML which provides standard and unified definitions of the ES elements related with people, processes, services and mechanisms for EAI (Losavio et al., 2002; Losavio et al., 2003). It is an extension of the BCMI (Brown et al., 1994) for integrated CASE technology. Two levels of this model, process and services, were extended with the three ntegration views proposed in (Sandoe, 2001): the backward, orward and upward views. Backward and forward integration refer to the integration of the internal and external business aspects, respectively. Upward integration considers those aspects related to business management. However, the mechanisms level was found independent from the Sandoe’s views (Losavio et al., 2002). BCMI was also extended with the people level, concerning the human factors (Losavio et al., 2005).

UML was selected as the specification language for EAIF because it is now widely used as an industrial standard modeling language. It supports aggregation and specialization and it provides extension mechanisms. In this sense, EAIF is flexible to technological evolution since it can be easily extended with new information technology mechanisms.

In this work, the EAIF UML model has been complemented with a textual specification of the main classes and guidelines to facilitate the instantiation process of the framework. The textual specification is simply an informal structured text or template, complementing the UML class specification. The idea was to avoid the complexity involved in the UML class diagrams, leaving in the diagrams only the class boxes with its name and relations, improving the  egibility and facility of use of the framework. It is cleathat a formal specification language could be recommended in this case, but it is outside the scope of this work, which focuses mostly a simple instantiation experience, according to precise guidelines.

This section presents an overview and the main parts of the textual specification of the framework.

EAIF Overview

Figure 1 presents the UML (OMG, 2003) class diagram of EAIF. In order to reduce complexity, only the classes, relationship and role names are shown. Notice that the navigability of the associations is bidirectional and that only a limited range of very well known processes, services and mechanisms is shown in the class diagram. Some of the classes could be further specialized, such as the «Sales and Marketing Management Process» class which can be specialized into the classes Sales Management Process and Marketing Management Process. They are not shown to abridge the presentation.

Figure 1. EAIF UML Class Diagram

EAIF Specification

In what follows, a textual specification of the classes and relationships, complementing the UML diagram, is presented. Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5 show diagrams with the main classes of figure 1, where the cardinality is omitted and only the specification of the class attributes is provided for each class, indicated by the arrow. The attribute name is in italic and their description is in no italic.

Figure 2. Specification of the Processes level

Figure 3. Specification of the Services level.

Figure 4. Specification of the Mechanisms level.

In what follows only the classes that will be used to instantiate the J-énesis the case study (see Section 3) are specified, in order to abridge the presentation.

Forward Processes class extends Processes.

Upward Processes class extends Processes.

Sales and Marketing Management Process class extends

Upward Processes.

Marketing Management Process class extends Sales and

Marketing Management Process.

Customer Service Process class extends Forward Processes.

Forward Services class extends Services.

Customer Relationship Management Systems class extends

Forward Services.

The «solution» attribute of the Patterns class is a reference to a known pattern catalogue or library, containing components, connectors, behavior, quality properties and any other information related to the pattern. The structure of this attribute depends on the structure of the catalogue (Buschmann et al., 96; Gamma et al., 95; Schmidt et al., 2001). The components of the Information Technology class are complex elements that can be further specified if necessary and they should be customized for each instance.

Architectural class extends Patterns Design class extends Patterns

Table 1 shows the specification of the relationships between People, Processes, Services and Mechanisms classes of figure 1. Notice also that in the associations, multiplicity i and role i are related to association end i

Table 1. Specification of the relationships between People, Processes, Services and Mechanisms classes.

CASE STUDY DESCRIPTION AND INSTANTIATION

In this section the CRM system case study is presented. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) approach is a new widely used business strategy and still evolving. It is centered on the customer and its relation with the organization (Turban et al., 2005). CRM addresses all the customer touch points, such as face-to-face, Internet, or phone (Sandoe, 2001). It integrates sales, marketing and service strategies. It helps to establish collaborative relationships with customers on a long-term basis, using information technology such as databases, data warehouses,
and data mining.

In general, CRM solutions consider three phases (Tiwana, 2001):

Acquisition: the organization acquires new customers. The organization competes to provide better product/service according to the customer needs.

Enhancement: it increases sales per customer. It gives good supplies at low cost. It has built-in pricing flexibility.

Retention and Loyalty: it requires customer knowledge to build service adaptability and use incentives to retain customers, such as the creation of new products. The ability to retain customers is a major determining factor.

J-énesis is a CRM system covering the services for the customer retention and loyalty phase. It offers, through Internet, registration services to attend software courses, providing products and services that consider customer needs (profiles) (Acuña & Rodriguez, 2003]. Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) (Szyperski, 2002) is used as theintegration mechanism.

Processes

The J-énesis application supports the following processes:

Marketing: to provide data on software courses, customers’ profiles and customer retention and loyalty strategies for marketing decision making.

Customer service: to provide customer satisfaction using the information about products, services and customers’ profile.

J-énesis provides facilities to gain customer knowledge to build service adaptability, Deliver new products that meet current customers´ needs and create and transmit incentives retain customers. However, it does not support a call center service.

The users of J-énesis are: marketing analyst, customer service analyst and customer.

Services

The following services are identified

Collect, recall and update customer profile: personal information, preferences, capabilities, and markets and business environment data.

Collect, recall and update software courses: information on software courses and services according to the customer’s profile.

Collect, recall and update customer retention strategies: to deal with encouragement strategies to maintain customer loyalty.

Historic: all transactions are stored in databases for further analysis purposes.

Subscribe/unsubscribe software courses: this service allows customer to subscribe/unsubscribe software courses according to the customer’s requirements.

Note that in general, the collect, recall and update operations are required to be reliable, efficient and attractive; historic transactions must be reliable and efficient, and finally efficiency is also required for the subscribe/unsubscribe operation.

Architecture

J-énesis is structured according to a three-layer (Shaw & Garlan, 1996) architecture. The layers are user interface, data and business logic. Some of the design patterns used are Persistent Data Manager and Observer (Rogers, 1997).

Information Technology

J-énesis uses the following technology:

The J2EE platform is essentially a distributed computing platform; Java-centric environment from SUN, for designing, developing, building and deploying componentoriented ES. A J2EE application is a collection of software components that are engineered to be distributed across multiple computing tiers over the Internet o Intranet (Szyperski, 2002).

The java web server is Tomcat 4.0.x (Apache, 2002).

The following J2EE 1.3 APIs were used in the development system:

JDBC 2.0 (Java Data Base Connectivity) for database connectivity between the Java and MySQL.

Java Servlets 2.3 extends the functionality of a Web server, generating dynamic content (HTML and XML) with Java Server Pages (JSP)1.2

JavaMail 1.2 and interacting with web clients using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is the protocol for communication between applications. SOAP is a platform independent, language, based on XML.

The Java^TM language was used to develop the application (SUN, 1997).

EAIF instantiation with the J-énesis case study

In this section, the EAIF instantiation with J-énesis is presented. Notice that the textual specification is directly used instead of UML instance diagrams, in order to simplify and abridge the presentation.

The EAIF classes are instantiated with J-énesis according to the guidelines presented in Table 2.

Table 2. EAIF instantiation process with the J-énesis case study.

Notice that for this application, the subclass Marketing Management Process of class Sales and Marketing Management Process is instantiated as an upward process. Figure 6 shows Marketing_upward_process class specification.

Figure 6. EAIF instantiation Marketing_upward_process class with J-énesis.

Figures 7 (part a – part b) show of Jénesis_ forward_process class specification. Figures 8, 9 and 10 show the instantiation of the Services, Mechanisms and People classes, respectively.

Figure 7. EAIF instantiation J-énesis_forward_process class with J-énesis (part a).

Figure 7. EAIF instantiation J-énesis_forward_process class with J-énesis (part b).

Figure 8. EAIF instantiation services class with J-énesis

Figure 9. EAIF instantiation mechanisms class with J-énesis.

Figure 10. EAIF instantiation people class with J-énesis.

Note that services functionality 2 and 3 have similar quality properties even if they are used by different people; in Collect, recall and update software courses and Collect, recall and update customer retention strategies only recall is performed by

Customer Service Analysts. Portability is transparent, for the use of the Java language and usability is required by both kinds of people since the have to change data and consult (maintainability) directly on-line; recoverability is desired for fault tolerance and efficiency is provided by the network context.

Figure 11 shows the instantiation of the relationship between Processes, Services, Mechanisms and People classes. Notice that «mechanisms» are transparent to «Marketing Analysts», «Customer Service Analysts» and «Customer», which means that the association mechanisms_people_role is not applicable in this case. This is due to the fact that only the production stage and not the development stage of the
system, is considered.

Figure 11. EAIF instantiation of the relationship between Processes, Services, Mechanisms and People classes with J-énesis.

It is important to notice that the EAIF instantiation allows to specify the complete processes, services, mechanisms and people performed by a training organization, even if some of the processes are not supported by explicit J-énesis services; for example, the process «Marketing_upward_process». However, since this process is required by the business activity in the organization, the EAIF process instance with the J-énesis process could recommends the implementation of additional support services as a business strategy. For example, an ERP System and a Decision Support System could be integrated to the CRM System.

During the instantiation process we have observed that the information related to the case study must be available and domain experts’ support is highly recommended. The goal is to avoid the modeling of unreal situations.

The EAIF specification and instantiation guidelines allow the modeling of all the concepts for this case study. The analysis obtained after the instantiation process (Table 2) is presented in what follows:

Although during the instantiation was not necessary to add new elements to EAIF, we consider it extensible because it is specified in UML. New classes could be added to EAIF, using the aggregation/composition and generalization/ specialization mechanisms, if needed.

All the elements of the applications could be represented by EAIF. Nevertheless we cannot conclude its completeness because further study is needed. EAIF was easy to use, because besides the UML model enriched with a textual specification, guidelines were provided for the instantiation process.

CONCLUSIONS

The main contributions of EAIF are to offer a standard, organized and unified view of the main aspects involved in an integration project and to provide support to detect inconsistencies monitoring the changes in the definition of integration processes, the services adapted to these processes and the mechanisms implementing these services. EAIF is specified as a standard UML model to provide this standard organized and unified view, and it is complemented with a textual specification and guidelines to facilitate the instantiation process. UML was selected as the specification language because it is an accepted industrial standard modeling language and it provides extension mechanisms to support the technology evolution. This is reflected in changes at the EAIF mechanisms level, where new information technology mechanisms can be easily added to the model. It is clear that formal specification languages could be recommended instead of UML and the textual specification, but it is outside the scope of this work, which focuses mostly a simple instantiation exercise according to precise guidelines, that can be easily followed and reused by practitioners. Notice that the instantiation process provided can be considered an iterative process, if the iteration is performed for each process at process level with its services and iterating again for each services, considering the mechanisms involved. The process is also incremental if intermediate products are considered in the iterations.

The instantiation of EAIF with a real operational forward integration service system as case study, a J2EE-based CRM system for customer retention and loyalty, respectively, was presented to experiment the applicability of the framework. It is obvious that the EAIF maturity will improve as more case studies will be considered. Moreover, we feel that the instantiation guidelines could be further refined in order to minimize the need for a domain expert. At present, EAIF has no automatic tools support, but its standard model can be used to define the conceptual base for these tools.

The EAIF application to a case study pointed out some aspects of the CRM system studied, such as processes that are not supported by services. This aspect can help process engineers and designers to review their automation strategies. In this sense, EAIF is a useful tool to detect and document business processes.

Future work will focus on the extension of the specification, using the UML extension mechanisms. Stereotypes can be defined and OCL (Object Constraints Language) can be used at the mechanisms level, to formalize the quality requirements specification for the architectural solutions, where standard quality models can be also used at this stage. The extended specification of EAIF can be used to describe the transformations between the EAIF levels and the CIM, PIM and PSM models in a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) (OMG, 2001) context.

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