The Customer Comes FirstThe Customer Comes First

Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., a $10 billion-a-year grocery chain with nearly 1,000 stores in the Southeast, is moving toward a services architecture so it can be more responsive to the local demands of its customers, chief technology officer Charlie Weston says. The company had grown dependent on a network of regional warehouses and an aging supply-chain system that was geared toward efficient purchasing, yet provided little integration with other systems. But new CEO Peter Lynch wants the company to focus on what the customer wants rather than what the company is best at buying, meaning that its systems have to get a lot more flexible.

Turning to a services architecture, Weston says, will let store-level systems call upon application services that will react to a store's changing needs. If a store system consistently reports a low fresh-flower inventory, systems will be in place to automatically increase the rate at which flowers are delivered. "What the SOA will allow us to do is to aggregate systems, integrate systems, and define them such that we can plan, analyze, and execute at a neighborhood-store level," Weston says. It's requiring a multimillion-dollar investment in technologies, including CommerceQuest Inc.'s business-process-management software for integration, new Unix servers, and consulting services. "Customers are at the core of it all," Weston says.

But TSYS Prepaid Inc., a division of Total System Services Inc. that provides prepaid debit-card services for businesses and banks, didn't have to make any substantial investments to adopt a services architecture. Instead, it changed its application development strategy, CTO Carl Ansley says.

Five years ago, the company rolled out one mammoth online Java application that its clients used to approve and issue cards. It released updates of the entire application quarterly to introduce new features, and that worked fine for a couple of years. But then, using Systinet Corp.'s Java server, it broke the application into multiple apps that would talk to each other through a services architecture. It set up a Web-services gateway and connected the smaller apps via a service bus built in-house, and was off and running, with the ability to add or tweak services on the fly.

Now card issuers can pick and choose which features they want to tap and whether they want to integrate those services with their own customer-service systems, use TSYS-supplied Web interfaces, or have TSYS act as an outsourced customer-service unit.

TSYS can now meet its clients' needs faster than ever, while clients can issue cards quicker and have more flexibility in how they manage support for cardholders, Ansley says. "One thing we've learned about SOAs is that it's not just a technical thing," he says. "It's a way of looking at your business in terms of how you're looking at your client."

It's clear that there's no shortage of routes to achieving a services-oriented architecture, but the commonality is almost always the customer. "They may not know that an SOA is underneath it, and they shouldn't," Gardner says. "They should see more personalization. They should see swifter and better solutions to their problems. They should just see better customer service in general."

Illustration by Celia Johnson