So I'm still waiting for the much anticipated Dell Notebook beast I ordered nearly 2 weeks ago. In fact, it only just went into production yesterday. It has been a long and arduous process in dealing with Dell and the only positive to come out of it so far is that I am writing an absolutely corker of an article about what SO(A) means to your customers, and citing Dell as an example of how not to do it. Keep and eye on Jonathon Goodyears The Angry Coder - I'm going to have a go at bending his ear enough so that he'll publish it.
In the meantime though, let me fill you in on the dilemma with Dell. Dell are a major global manufacturer of high technology products (well...Duh!) and are a partner of Microsoft, so you'd assume they'd be pretty tech savvy. But, just as the old saying says that no Decorator lives in a clean and tidy house (its a saying, I didn't make it up - no flaming me), Dell have some pretty horrendous DIY mishaps in their own organisation it seems.
In the canonical order fulfillment example, the process is quite simple and straightforward.
1. Customer places an order
2. Order is processed by financial team to take payment
3. If payment is approved, order message is sent to production scheduling system and delivery scheduling systems, and a confirmation is emailed to the customer.
4. Production system sends a message to the inventory system detailing the components they want, then sits and waits for them.
5. Inventory system orders components not in stock (and perhaps emails the customer? )
6. When all the components are in stock, the inventory system orders a carbon based lifeform to load them on a trolley and take them to the production line. A message is sent back to the production system to say "Yup, on they're way"
7. Production system orders between 1 and 50 other cabon based life forms to retrieve the components, form a neat orderly line and plug them all together.
8. Carbon based life-forms do as they are told, test the system and then tell the production system they are done.
9. Production system tells the world (including the customer) that it is done. THe delivery system picks up this message (publish subscribe?) and prints out packing labels etc for another carbon based lifeform to stick on box.
10. System is dispatched, barcoded on the way out of the door. A message is sent to the dispatch system to say that all went well, and the customer gets another email.
11. Customer gets no sleep all night, then spends the following day at home until system is delivered at 1 minute before 6 in the evening.
So there you have. If the goods are in stock, and the payment is fine you're probably looking at a system in about 3-4 days max. More than that though with all those systems firing messages around the thoroughly well designed SO(A) based IT infrastructure at the manufacturer, the customer can get up to the minute information on what's going on with their order, both by email and the web. In fact, the customer can even be more involved in the whole process, getting out of stock notifications for components that are hard to come by and allowing them the chance to call the company up and replace them with more expensive ones that are in stock (ka-ching goes the manufacturer - yay, everyone wins).
Now, here's I imagine it works at Dell.
You order a system on the web. The system caches the order. At a certain time when network load is low (say 1 hour past close of business that day), database replication occurs sending the order to an order fulfillment centre in a different continent (India). The workers arrive, print out the massive stack of orders, and then start working through them, paper by paper. Chances are on a busy day they won't finish that day's orders until tomorrow (which is way past the close of business in the UK tomorrow, effectively making payment processing take place in two UK business days time).
If there is a problem with handling the payment (say our offshore compatriot miskeys it from the slip of paper), he logs onto a system to say there's a problem. The next day in the UK someone gets an email there's a problem, and tries again (4 days have passed now since the order was placed) this time keying in the number correctly. YAY. A notification is sent back to India for them to approve the order and send it through to production (which of course, once again happens overnight).
The notification is sent through, and the next day in England (day 5) the system is moved into production, and the webtracking database updated with it's status. More paper is printed, two slips, containing the customer's order number and customer number. The customer hasn't got these yet, so can't actually track their order.
These pieces of paper are dispatched at the end of the business day using low-priority post, and the customer gets them after the weekend, the following tuesday (yes, we're at day 9 now). Customer logs onto the website and sees YES the system is scheduled for production. Sometimes. You see, the order tracking database was written by someone with absolutely no understanding of concurrency management, so pretty much every 2, 3 and 4th time the customer triesto track the order the website says that the customer number and order number don't match. This is presumably the only error message the page knows how to display and is probably a result of the previous status request locking the order so that subsequent requests fail to get the page until the lock expires.
So, 9 days JUST TO TRACK THE ORDER. 7-8 days JUST TO SCHEDULE PRODUCTION IF THE PARTS ARE IN STOCK (mine weren't).
The beauty of SO(A) is that you can link systems together in a non-invasive way, gradually introducing a complete and effective digital nervous system into the company. It seems to me that Dell are crying out for just such a solution. Think about it. Without involving any humans at all, that system could have been scheduled into production the same day as the order. Happy customer, less staff costs. If parts needed ordering a B2B solution based on secure web-services would have had the parts on their way the same day the order was placed.
SO(A) is not just about a neat way to do neat things with cool technology. It's about making customers happy, and that is what ALL businesses should be trying to do. The more hoops people jump through, the less inclined they'll be to repeat the process in the future. SO(A) gets rid of the hoops and introduces a one-way fast track to customer satisfaction, and higher profit margins.
8:19:40 PM 
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