MDF Goes Beyond
Flexibility for Changing Business Rules
By
Jan 14, 2005, 15:13

In a Business-to-Business environment, collateral and promotional items are made available to the sales force (often including independent agents or dealers) to be used to produce sales for the company.

To counteract the tendency to stockpile material, some companies impose restrictions on who can order collateral, where it can be shipped, or how much can be ordered during a particular time period. MDF programs these requirements during the set-up of our web-based fulfillment system, and they then become part of the rules that govern the system.

When one of our largest clients upgraded to our web-based system, it required a real time evolving solution, rather than a static set of rules, since their requirements change frequently.

In order to accommodate such a dynamic environment, MDF created an XML interface to our web-based system for real time transfer of customer master data from the client’s system to ours. This means the data gets maintained in the client system only at an off-site location then is transferred to us and uploads into our system automatically.

So, if a “ship-to” address is flagged as invalid, no one may place orders to that address. If there are restrictions or item limits attached to the “ship-to” address, they are entered once and remain in effect until changed by the client. Similarly as users are entered and validated on the client’s master system, they will be added into our system at the same time without human intervention.

This should be particularly appealing to any client, since it is non-platform specific. Many companies hesitate to go outside for services because they feel that timeliness and accuracy of data being maintained may be lost in the process. Using XML eliminates this.


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