As a developer, if your organization is deploying IBM Order Management (OM) software on the cloud, or transitioning to the cloud from our on-premise solution, you’re probably wondering how you can help users get the most benefit from the service. Can you help fulfillment and offering managers make the best use of this data for reporting and alerting? Is there a way for you to enable IT professionals to troubleshoot and triage possible issues, and monitor system performance?
The data collected in the OM database is immensely valuable. But as you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. It is easier for the human brain to process information, grasp difficult concepts and identify emerging patterns in a visual format like a chart or a graph versus raw data. Data extraction combined with visualization helps users to not only understand the insights from the underlying data in a clear and cohesive fashion, but also draw conclusions in a timely manner. And that’s where you have an opportunity to be a hero!
In this blog, we’ll look at the how you can help users tap into the data collected in the OM database, which could include thousands of variables, to establish relationships between different data points (including those from other applications) in order to:
- Identify areas that require immediate attention, e.g., a store not performing well
- Clarify what could influence buyer patterns, e.g., introduction of a new product
- Identify needs for different markets (regions)
- Perform planning around inventory and operations
Below are seven different ways the OM cloud-based service allows you to utilize OM data, including options to visualize and extract data into an on-premise system.
Option 1 Event Sourcing – As an order moves through OM, events are triggered in real time – create an order, schedule an order for shipment, ship an order, etc. Many different users within the system can use this near real-time data to take immediate action. For example, events may trigger the sending of a series of emails to the customer. Customer service reps can monitor events, like orders and returns, via a dashboard and receive alerts. Product management can track orders for specific products for analysis and reporting.
Event sourcing utilizes the OM Events framework to provide a near-real-time data stream to support reactive analysis (short loop) workload or build data visualizations based on near-real-time data. This approach requires some amount of extension, as shown below:
Note: Introduction of IBM MQ and Integration server provides better transaction integrity and reduces the impact of latency for remote communication to prevent long running transactions.
This option can be used not only with events supplied in the offering but also with other data sets within the OM application.
Option 2 Data Extract Service – This service is a good fit for extracting stable and cold data – e.g., data related to closed orders, time to fulfill orders, number of new orders. In other words, any time real-time data is not required. The process allows you to extract data from a set of predefined OM database tables and publish the data in a flat file to an external SFTP site. The extract service can be setup to run at a recurring interval, for example to support the creation of daily, weekly or monthly reports. Users can combine the data with data from other systems, such as shipping, billing, order capture or job scheduling systems, and generate reports that include visualization.
The extract service uses the last modified timestamp from the database table to extract data on subsequent execution. This ensures the consistent delivery of data.
Given that this is a separate / dedicated agent server-based process that extracts data from the standby/backup database, it does not add any workload to the transactional application ecosystem. Since this is an asynchronous process and runs on its own schedule, this process extracts data in its current state at the execution time. As an example, if order status changed from A to B and B to C, the extract may capture order with state C because that’s the state at the time of this process. The visibility into states A and B will not be available. If there is a need to track status changes, this can be done using Option 1 Event Sourcing, described above.
As a limitation of DB2 read only database, CLOB and BLOB cannot be extracted. However, custom tables can be created to populate the data in non-CLOB format. These custom tables can then be extracted. However, to ensure optimal performance and dataset size, these tables should be purged.
Option 3 Order Management API – GET APIs are provided so that organizations can perform READ operations. The details of the APIs are provided in the SaaS developer toolkit. API requests are processed synchronously in the application server JVM and responses are sent back to the client. This option can be used to query data on an ad-hoc basis, for example to perform triage on what happened with a specific order, but not recommended for large volumes of queries because it is additional load on the application and transactional database.
Note: API Input should be examined carefully to avoid retrieving large datasets.
Option 4 Order Management DB Query Client – An alternative to using GET APIs, this client (a browser based tool) allows you to query the OM database securely and on an on-demand basis. This client should only be used for troubleshooting purposes and not for data extraction or reporting of large datasets. For example, an IT manager may need to quickly query data from an application to understand an issue, such as an order or shipment delay, and perform triage.
Option 5 Cognos with OM SaaS – This option allows you to create and schedule reports using IBM Cognos, available as part of the IBM OMS cloud-based service. The reports are created against the backup/standby copy of the transactional database. Therefore, it does not add any workload to the transactional system. IBM Cognos offers out of the box operational reports and allows users to build their own if they choose. The reports include visualization to quickly see answers to questions regarding order status, inventory, top selling or most returned products, and more.
Note: This option allows you to create and schedule reports from the OM database only.
Option 6 OM Key Performance Indicators – Our new OM user interface provides a view of KPIs around key business objects in OM. Customizable dashboards can display fill rate, SLA rate, over capacity, ship from store utilization rate and pick up in store utilization rate. More KPIs will continue to be added so check this link regularly.
Option 7 Application Monitoring – Available from OM SaaS Self-Service Tool, these charts provide System Integrators and IT Administrators the capability to monitor the health and performance of the OM Application and collect metrics around how the application is being used. Typically, cloud-based services don’t provide this level of visibility, but with IBM OM software on the cloud you can be a hero and provide this to your IT team.
Take advantage of these available options to make your life easier and address a wide range of users’ data visualization needs.
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