With back-end support in place, Avnet could extend its Savoir front end to all its customers. It did so by refactoring Savoir's 31 applications -- including order status, returns management, invoice management, customer security management, lead management, credit reporting, and invoicing -- as services that would run alongside legacy Avnet systems, rather than forcing all systems to rely on a single Savoir platform.

Today, information arrives in various forms from various clients, passing into a set of services that translates it according to the operational data layer's standards while flagging anomalies along the way. Those services then move the data to Avnet's various ERP and transaction systems in the formats required, as well as ensure process consistency no matter what applications a particular Avnet division happens to use.

The end result is a loosely coupled framework inside and out. "This architecture allows any application within the Avnet environment to readily provide services to other applications or to trading partners through any one or combination of communication vehicles, such as XML, objects, JMS [Java Message Service], FTP, RosettaNet, EDI, and e-mail," Valcamp says.

Building block by block

As Avnet built out its services, it established common-sense criteria to ensure a successful outcome. First, each service needed to be reusable elsewhere, so its development costs could be spread out. Second, the service abstraction had to be able to accommodate data representations that were likely to change frequently. Third, the locations of the data sources themselves had to be able to change often. As Valcamp notes, "All you are concerned with is calling an interface, not where the interface is."