September 16, 2008
Cutit Saws Ltd.
2101 E. Coliseum Blvd.
Fort Wayne, IN 46805
Dear Cutit Saws Ltd.:
Excellent SOA Consulting is an excellent choice to fulfill the requirements of the proposal you request. We are a leader in providing these deliverables with over 20 years of experience.
Our staff has carefully reviewed your requirements and considered numerous options in determining the ideal solution for this project. Our proposal presents our recommendations that best meet your objectives.
Excellent SOA Consulting is exceptionally qualified to fulfill this contract for several reasons:
Our pricing is extremely competitive. We have made every effort to provide you the best price possible. We want your business and will work diligently to help keep your costs to a minimum.Our quality standards are the foundation of our success in the industry and we are capable of offering you a technical solution with superior selection of components to ensure the flexibility, performance, reliability, expandability, and agility requirements of your company.
We propose a SOA automation system for $85,000. This system will enable Cutit Saws to manufacture the new saw blade efficiently and keep ahead of the competition. A rough analysis of your current systems shows that after implementing the SOA automation system you will receive an ROI in 5 years saving approximately $25,000 in the first year alone. In addition, manufacturing costs on every saw blade will be reduced by 25%.
Our proposal further details how the SOA automation system will be appropriate for meeting your immediate needs as well as providing support well into the future.
Sincerely,
The Excellent SOA Consulting Team
Excellent SOA Consulting
SOA Project Proposal
Prepared For:
Professor Paul Lin
CPET 545: Service Oriented Architecture
Submitted By:
Mathew Duguid
Josh Prowant
Doug Schultz
Date:
11 September 2008
“A Feasibility Study of Implementing a Cost Effective
SOA-Based Enterprise Automation System”
Executive Summary
Purpose of the project, project time period, development process, short description of the final deliverables, acknowledgement, a list of keywords
Keywords: Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, proposal, Reference Model, Reference Architecture, service, Web services
1. Problem Statement
The current automation system utilized by Cutit Saws Ltd. has proven ill-suited to meet the current and future business requirements of the company. As such, a need for a new SOA-based automation system has grown out of the following challenges:
- The current manufacturing process is not capable of producing the newest model of chainsaw to adequately meet customer demand.
- A larger competitor with more resources in place poses a threat to market share through the potential development of a similar design.
- The current automation system is not scalable, and there are numerous performance and concurrent usage problems.
- Immediate plans for growth and future plans for selling the company can only be realized if the automation system in place allows for adaptability, scalability, and foreign integration in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
2. Proposed Solution and Scope
- Business strategy and SOA
- Project roles and responsibilities
- Cost and Benefits Analysis
- Deliverable, Constraints, and Limits
- Initial Risks Identification
- Progress Reports and Frequency of Reporting
- Final Report and Recommendations
Based on initial discussions with Cutit Saws Ltd., our understanding of the items to be included in the SOA automation system are listed below. Excellent SOA Consulting will provide a preliminary service-oriented architecture supplemented with a list of Web service-centric technology components required to establish it. The main objective of the SOA-based automation system would be to establish unity among manufacturing processes and allow easy extendibility to meet unpredictable business demands.
Online user service:This service will meet the objective of growth by allowing customer relationships to be established in markets other than the immediate geographic area. Furthermore, it will ensure added efficiency in the order and delivery process and translate to increased customer satisfaction.
Billing service: This service will expand on the current accounting system and allow increased flexibility and integration with other business components.
Sales forecast service: This service will allow demand to adequately be predicted and supply adjusted to meet that demand. As such efficiency will be increased.
Order fulfillment service: This service will expand on the current inventory system and allow increased flexibility and integration with other business components.
Customer care services: This service will help to ensure customer satisfaction and retention, thereby allowing for growth opportunities.
Order management service: This service will serve as the core component of all mentioned business services. It will allow future integration of services and easy adaptability to changing business demands.
The preliminary SOA and technology components required to establish it will be provided in the desired time limit imposed by Cutit Saws Ltd., one month.
Risks: Risk factors might involve development cost overruns, operating-cost miscalculation, or any other factor that could, in the customer's judgment, result in a less-than-satisfactory final product.
3. Project Plan and Phases
- Introduction
- The incremental development model, the spiral model
In order to ensure the success of a cost-effective SOA-based enterprise automation system at Cutit Saws Ldt., Excellent SOA Consulting will base the project plan and phases on the proven spiral model for systems development [5].
- Define the new system requirements in as much detail as possible. Information is obtained by conducting interviews with a number of users about requirements and aspects of the existing system.
- Create a service inventory blueprint to serve as a model for service design.
- Construct a prototype of the new system based on the service blueprint and including service contract design and service logic design.
- Evaluate the initial design in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, and risks. Coordinate evaluation with Cutit Saws Ltd. to determine if the design will adequately meet business requirements and develop a second design if necessary.
- At the customer’s option, the entire project can be aborted if the risk is deemed too great.
- Develop the appropriate services based on the initial design and service inventory blueprint.
- Conduct service testing.
- Deploy the services while considering service governance. Routine maintenance is carried out on a continuing basis to prevent large-scale failures and to minimize downtime.
3.1 Analysis and Requirements
3.1.1 Conduct Interviews
3.1.2 Current Business Process
3.1.3 Current Infrastructure Capability Analysis
3.1.4 Services
3.1.5 Requirements Analysis
3.1.6 Requirements Specifications
Look at service encapsulation options for legacy systems and service-based middleware platforms; consider custom services to replace outdated automation hub.
Requirement: Cutit wants to leverage service-oriented computing to establish unity across its modest enterprise and to achieve a state where solution logic can be more easily extended in response to unpredictable business demands.
3.2 Review of Architectures and Standards
At Excellent SOA Consulting we embody the latest design standards and reference architecture as recommended by OASIS.
All implementations of SOA are based in part on abstract models which help provide a framework for understanding significant entities and relationships between them. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) has developed a standard Reference Model for SOA (shown below) that is not directly tied to any standards, technologies, or other concrete implementation details. In essence, the OASIS Reference Model specifies that services must have accompanying service descriptions to convey the meaning and real world effects of invoking a service. These descriptions must also convey both semantics (meaning) and syntax (structure) for humans and applications. Each service has an interaction model, which is the externally visible aspect of invoking a service. The execution context is the set of specific circumstances surrounding any given interaction and typically includes a decision point involving policies and contracts [4].
OASIS and other organizations have expanded on the basic Reference Model and proposed various Reference Architectures. Reference architectures introduce additional details and concepts involving classes of services and are useful to architects of SOA. For instance, organizations such as the Open Group, SOA Practitioners, and even Microsoft and IBM have all proposed various reference architectures for SOA.
As shown in the above figure, visibility is a key concept in realizing SOA. Visibility is the capacity for those with needs and those with capabilities to be able to see and interact with each other. This is typically implemented using a common set of protocols, standards, and technologies across service providers and service consumers [4]. Web services technology provides this commonalityand its association with service-orientationas a paradigmand SOA as aTechnologyarchitecture has become commonplace [1]. The figure below shows many of the common organizations involved in the development of SOA standards [2].
The key Web service standards common to most SOA implementations are: SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, WS-Security, WS-BPEL, ebXML and other Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based standards, and the various WS-* standards [1, 2]. These SOA standards can be categorized into a few contexts and are briefly discussed in the Table below [2]:
- Discovery – standards to describe and located services;
- Integration – standards to help heterogeneous systems work together;
- Orchestration – standards that define business workflow or conditions that define how services should work together;
- Protocol – standards that define messaging systems or infrastructure frameworks;
- Security – standards that make SOA messages secure or services authorize and authenticate.
- Transactionality – standards to make services support state, data transactions, and reliability.
Table: Popular SOA Standards [2]
Standard, Specification, API / Organization / Category / Description
ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) / OASIS / Integration / A modular suite of specifications that enables enterprises of any size and in any geographical location to conduct business over the Internet.
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) / W3C / Protocol / A protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over a computer network, normally using HTTP.
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) / OASIS / Discovery / A platform-independent, XML-based registry for automated services to be discovered and defined.
WS-BPEL (Web services Business Process Execution Language) / OASIS / Orchestration / Enabling users to describe business process activities as Web services and define how they can be connected to accomplish specific tasks
WSDL (Web services Definition Language) / W3C / Discovery / An XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.
WS Addressing (Web services Addressing) / W3C / Discovery / Provides transport-neutral mechanisms to address web services and messages.
WS-Security / WSS / OASIS / Security / Provides a means for applying security to Web services.
Many of the first-generation web services (WSDL, XML Schema Definition Language, SOAP, and UDDI) suffer from a lack of quality of service provisions in the areas of message-level security, cross-service transactions, and reliable messaging [1]. The second-generation Web services messaging standards (WS-*) help to close this gap. In an attempt to make implementation simpler, the WSI-Organization has organized these Web service standards into “profiles” that define a subset of the standards shown in the table and describe how they should be used together. These profiles include the WS-I Basic Profile, which defines how SOAP should be used with other standards; the WS-I Basic Secure Profile, which describes how messages should be secured using WS-Security; and the WS-I Reliable Secure Profile (WS-I RSP), which defines how WS-Secure Conversation, WS-Security, and WS-Reliable Messaging should be used together [3].
3.3 SOA Infrastructure Design
Figure 1 Cutit Saw Design
3.4 System Design
3.4.1 High-Level System Design
3.4.2 Service Modeling: UML Diagrams - use case, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams
3.4.3 Selection of Integrated Development Environment: Tools, Programming languages
3.4.4 Physical System Design - Determination of SOA Framework
3.4.5 Services Design
3.4.6 Messaging
3.4.7 Low-Level Design
3.5 Development of SOA Services
3.6 SOA Service Module Testing
3.7 System Integration and Testing
3.8 Customer Testing
4. Project Schedule
4.1 Work Breakdown Structure, Milestones(what - tasks and/or activities; who, when – begin, end, duration)
The project will consist of the following four phases of development:
Phase 1: System Prototype / Demonstration (1 month)
1.Conduct interviews with Cutit Saws
2.Finalize Requirements
3.Create service inventory
4.Construct Prototype of minimal services
5.Perform demonstration
6.Assess prototype system with customer
Phase 2: System Development / Integration
1.Finalize service blueprint
2.Develop appropriate services based on service blueprint
3.Develop metrics to monitor / evaluate system performance
4.Develop system test plan
5.Conduct System test and evaluation
6.Update system based on test results
7.Conduct regression testing
Phase 3: System Deployment
1.Deploy services incrementally
2.Monitor performance metrics
Phase 4: Support System
1.Perform maintenance and support
4.2 Tasks Dependencies (Network Diagrams)
5. Estimated Project Cost and Required Resources
- Direct labor: personnel hours and cost, equipment, and others
- Subcontract tasks
- Hardware/software/telecommunications
- Travel
- Support services
- Consultancy support
- Contingency
Man Hours / Costs
Direct labor / 1000 / $45,000
Subcontractor / 50 / $5,000
Software / $10,000
Hardware / $10,000
Travel / 80 / $5,000
Support services / 40 / $5,000
Consultancy support / 40 / $5,000
Totals / $85,000
6. Qualifications of the Project Consulting Team
While several firms can design service-oriented architecture-based automation systems, Excellent SOA Consulting has produced some of the most recognized systems in various industries. The Excellent SOA Consulting team has worked with information technology, banking, healthcare, and manufacturing industries.
7. References
[ 1] SOA Principles of Service Design, by Thomas Erl, ISBN 0-13-234482-3, Prentice
Hall – Pearson Education, Inc., 2008.
[ 2] “A standard SOA paradox,” by Adam Michelson, Feb. 2007,
[ 3] “Delivering Business Value Through Standards,” white paper, SAP AG, Feb. 2008.
[ 4] OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture 1.0, Committee Specification 1, 10/12/2006,
[ 5] “What is spiral model,” TechTarget, 2008,