Services & Solutions

Service Orientated Architecture

Creating the agile organisation - an incremental approach to building the Service Oriented Enterprise

To maintain a competitive edge it is essential businesses implement a platform that adapts to changing business needs. Hard times mean organisations are often unwilling to undertake large transformational projects. However, they still need the agility to evolve, be competitive, and gain insight into risk across the business network. SAP provides the tools to do this through the end-to-end business process. Furthermore, the technology required is already embedded in the blueprint of your existing SAP environment.

Fighting the static business

• Managing the cost and complexity of change: As organisations grow organically or through acquisition, the cost and complexity of managing them increases significantly. The interdependency of the business network means even simple changes cause ripples throughout the whole environment. Consequentially, organisations find themselves stagnant, rather than driving change.
• Delivering more, quicker, with less: Businesses are involving faster than ever. Delivering integrated processes can be expensive and often require major business transformation.
• Bringing the 'extraprise' to life: Setting up new partner business processes is labour intensive and costly, as they need to be re-defined and re-developed each time.
• Abstracting and consolidating: Constantly changing communication channels makes reaching customers via new-media challenging. Merging vital customer information from disparate data sources adds to this complexity.
  

Micro-transformation - de-risking change

In the past, SOA projects focussed on large-scale business transformation and delivered huge payouts. Many businesses today are too risk averse and cost conscious to contemplate such a move. Bluefin's Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE) roadmap takes a micro-transformational approach to change.

• Optimise business processes: Identify business processes which can be optimised from a cost-benefit perspective and redesign them to reduce operational overhead. Enjoy simple, fast ROI and reduce risk across the business network.
• Out-task: Standardise your partner interface and interact with multiple suppliers without the challenges and costs of re-defining and re-developing individual process connections. Retain visibility and control of critical processes.
• Re-use and innovate: Implement a landscape that embraces change, enabling you to run additional SAP and third party applications on top of existing business processes. Deploy innovative solutions to reach customers and prospects.
  

So what is SOA?

The concept of SOA has been around for years but was advocated as 'the future' before its maturity. Lack of adoption has caused an endemic stagnation and distrust in what it means to the business and in some cases, SOA is seen to be a dirty word.

Fast forwarding to today, SOA has matured; SAP provides a framework which supports the end-to-end business process with prebuilt scenarios. This enables organisations to expose their business processes as Enterprise Services with a template approach, based on one of thousands of scenarios.

Organisations can rationalise the connections between different elements of their business landscape and create governance and strategy to ensure new connections are holistic, supportable and future-proofed.

The Bluefin roadmap

Bluefin Solutions can assist organisations in realising their SOA roadmap by providing long term strategy leadership coupled with an immediate capability to deliver enterprise applications. Because SOA is something you do and not a product, Bluefin can help deliver a governance model that drives success.

Bluefin Solutions understands not all organisations seek a transformational approach to business change. Bluefin's SOA roadmap is based on risk mitigation, careful governance and delivering ROI, enabling organisations to become a SOE incrementally rather than through large-scale transformation.