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Ripley - Chile

In 2005 Ripley contacted Ki Teknology to obtain assistance in the launching of its SAM PERU project, specifically to help it with Interfaces in its Merchandise Management Systems (SAM). That's how Ki Teknology, using its broad experience in software development, introduction of new architectures and project management, has perfermed the analysis of requirements, specifications, construction (40%) and testing of the interfaces related with the SAM PERU project under the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Ripley profile

Ripley opened its first store in 1956 and now it belongs to the Ripley Corp group, one of the largest companies in the retail market in Chile and Peru, with revenues of US $321 million.

The core business of Ripley is retail apparel, accessories and household goods through the different formats of a department stores. Ripley is also involved with financial services and provides direct credit to its customers through the Ripley card and the newly created Ripley Bank, offering consumer loans and MasterCard credit cards.

Ripley Corp operates in Chile and Peru and manages 39 stores, with a sales area totaling more than 322 thousand square meters and with more than 5 million credit cards issued. Ripley Bank has 35 branches in Chile (December 2005). The main competitive advantage of the Bank is its strong image, customer service and continuous technological innovation.

Analysis of the Problem

Following the need to implement the Merchandise Management System (SAM) in PERU the integration of all systems defined as a part of SAM is necessary and also the need to migrate and maintain the features through proper functioning through interfaces.

The main problem in this project was that there were many peer to peer interfaces between numerous systems running on different platforms. Also, we needed to achieve a correct definition with the use of standard messaging and make the origin and destination of these interfaces independent of each other, achieving a classification depending on the type of service they provide.

The chosen platform was Linux using WebSphere suite under the SOA architecture.

Solution

The first stage of the project was the definition of the necessary standards to realize the data requirements analysis of the interfaces between the systems, which must be focused on the application of SOA architecture. Once this goal was achieved, the next thing was the requirements analysis and identification of the business objects necessary to report between applications through interfaces.

The second stage was to define the new interfaces and determine if the old ones were necessary or if they required some modification. In every one of those interfaces there were specifications of: systems involved, business rules, necessary transformations, conversions and data mapping. For visual modeling and the specification of the solution to implant, the Rational Rose toolkit was used.

The third stage was the modification of the systems that send the business objects, generating in every interface the validations, transformations and mappings necessary to the systems that will consume this information in every required format. At the same time, different specialized connectors in different platforms were used to send and receive this messaging in XML format.

The strategy applied in this project by Ki Teknology was to have a team of analysts and testers on-site along with a specialized developing group located in our factory in Buenos Aires, Argentina, connected by a VPN.

Benefits for the Company

The main benefit of this solution is the integration between World Class systems, which are monolithic repositories which contain business processes used by all areas of the company and in most cases before this new implementation they didn't process online data. Now they do this with a reduced number of contacts, low coupling and high integration level.

Additionally we achieved an abstraction and isolation of the applications that provides a high level of business communication.

Medium and long-term projections estimate a significant decrease in maintenance costs for applications that do not necessarily affect other systems, and an increase in flexibility of new product development.

Today Ripley has converted part of its systems to SOA.

Finally it is noteworthy to mention that all projects used COPERNICO as a development process. COPERNICO is a software engineering process where the best practices for systems development are applied; this allows us to accomplish the objectives and achieve success in development projects. COPERNICO was developed and implemented according to our methodology, Information Technology Development Area - KEPLER Process (ITDA-KP)

Learned Lessons

When such a strong technological change is implemented, it is necessary to get initial support from key players within the organization who can help guarantee successful project execution, and to have professionals with extensive experience with orderly transitions to new technologies.

It is also essential to gain the acceptance of the users. This is a key issue in getting a high level of user satisfaction.