Databases in the Organization I

¶ … Databases in the Organization I Work for the databases in use throughout the company I work for perform a multitude of tasks, all coordinated and synchronized to the customers' orders, the definition of their Bills of Materials that guide production on the shop floor of what specifically to build for each customer, and the specifics of how to fulfill the orders shipped. The company I work for is a manufacturer that specializes in the development of customized or made-to-order electronics products for other businesses, and also for consumers. The databases that keep manufacturing synchronized to order management are the foundation of our company's distributed order management and fulfillment system as well. This distributed order management system is the single largest and most complex system in our entire company, also integrating to the company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. For the correct product to be produced at the right time, with the right configurations and options include, for the right customer, at the agreed-upon price, it is critical that all the databases work in conjunction with another. The development of these databases and their integration is the most critical aspect of the entire manufacturing strategy of the company, and according to AMR Research, critical for the development of a product customization strategy as well (AMR Research (2003). All of these databases are Oracle 9i-based with the distributed order management system being based on the Oracle manufacturing system with extensions to allow for customization for our specific company's needs. The Oracle databases must however work with the catalog management, customer management, pricing, supply chain, and services databases to ensure that a complete view of the customer, their requirements, and the implications on supply chain and fulfillment databases as well.

While the manufacturing systems are all based on Oracle, the catalog and content management system is based on Documentum/EMC, and the pricing management system is based on Selectica's applications running a Microsoft SQL Server database. The supply chain databases are also based on Oracle 9i as well and have been recently being piloted for upgrades to 11i to gain better collaboration levels of performance with key suppliers who are also now on 11i as well.

Both the content management and pricing systems are integrated into the Website content management systems that are run using IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite.

The need for a high level of content and pricing systems integration to our website has proven to deliver a high level of Return on Investment. This is also what Askegar and Columbus found in their research of the role of web-based systems in channel management (Askegar and Columbus. 2002). Our company is considering moving the entire website and online ordering system to Oracle iStore yet the cost of changing from IBM WebSphere at the present time is considered very expensive, and as a result many of the database integrations to WebSphere will continue being upgraded by our it staff to make sure the website stays reliable as more products are added to it. The pricing database in Microsoft SQL Server running with Selectica's pricing modules as the front-end application has given the web team adapters for linking SQL Server directly to WebSphere. That's because Selectica's and IBM had worked on the Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle 9, 10, and 11 migrations and Sybase adopters to make sure that pricing databases would be as compatible as possible across mixed database system architectures. Today Selectica's logic for managing Microsoft SQL Server is also built into the IBM WebSphere product, making my company's level of integration all the more reliable and scalable. With pricing in SQL Server and the many processes of order management dependent on a variety of oracle databases, and our content management system based in Documentum/EMC our company is concerned about having too many databases to support over the long-term. Despite the fact that special pricing requests can specifically be managed electronically, giving our company a competitive advantage, there needs to be greater levels of system integration to allow for higher performance of this specific process (Columbus, 2003)

As a result, the CIO has talked of moving to a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and creating a database standard to minimize potential performance, compatibility and integration issues in the future. The SOA initiative in our company is looking at Oracle Fusion, Microsoft.Net and SAP's NetWeaver architectures. While it is doubtful our company will move to just one database standard, an SOA platform will give us more flexibility in how we define process workflows in order management for example, which is an area that our company is grappling with today in terms of getting greater performance. While our company does have many different databases, today they are coordinated through having them all align to specific business processes first.