Crutchfield

Retailer Moves to Service-Oriented Architecture for Increased Business Agility

In the 1970s, Crutchfield’s car stereo catalogs revolutionized the industry by catering to do-it-yourself audio enthusiasts. Today, Crutchfield leads in expertise and service for a range of consumer electronics and relies on IT to support a growing and diverse online presence. While the company’s entrepreneurial approach to building systems resulted in unique and valuable capabilities, it also made those systems difficult to manage. In order to increase business agility, Crutchfield needed to move to a service-oriented architecture where applications share core services. To help solve interface issues and ease development of these new services, Crutchfield chose Windows® Communication Foundation, part of the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0. Using the service-oriented architecture of Windows Communication Foundation, Crutchfield expects to respond more quickly to business needs.

Situation

In 1974, Bill Crutchfield was restoring a classic Porsche 356 but was unable to find help installing an updated car stereo system. Perceiving a tremendous unmet market, Crutchfield launched a catalog that helped car stereo enthusiasts find and install the right system. Since then, Crutchfield has stayed faithful to its core values—searching out the best products, compiling expert information, and exceeding customers’ expectations for service.

Crutchfield now sells a broad range of consumer electronics lines through a variety of sales channels, including two retail stores and one of the Web’s first consumer electronics e-commerce sites. The majority of Crutchfield’s sales come through the Web, either through Crutchfield.com or through online intermediaries such as Amazon.com. Crutchfield recently expanded its online operations to include an online store that caters to customers in Canada and a Spanish-language version of its U.S. e-commerce site.

Windows Communication Foundation significantly improved the speed at which we could develop standards-compliant Web service communication calls. Steven Weiskircher, Vice President of Information Technology, Crutchfield

Creative IT Is a Competitive Advantage
IT plays a critical role in Crutchfield’s success, and the company relies on the drive and creativity of competent IT staff to support diversifying sales channels and to develop new functionality. Since the early 1990s, Crutchfield has relied on Microsoft® technology to build its business systems. Crutchfield.com offers an excellent example of how the company uses custom applications to differentiate itself.

“Over the years, Crutchfield has amassed a huge repository of technical data on car stereos and other electronics. IT helps us take advantage of those assets and make them available to customers. For example, visitors to Crutchfield.com can select their vehicle’s make and model, and their view of the Web site is automatically filtered to show only compatible products,” says Hank Hubbard, Senior Programmer Analyst for Crutchfield.

Custom Development Hinders Flexibility
To help foster unique and valuable solutions that deliver competitive advantage, Crutchfield intentionally keeps bureaucracy to a minimum in its IT department.

“Our corporate culture here at Crutchfield is very entrepreneurial, which allows us to move faster than our larger competitors and deliver more valuable service. The down-side to this approach for our IT, however, is a lack of consistency among applications, little reuse of code assets, and less business agility over the long term. We have difficulty adapting those systems to evolving business needs,” says Hubbard. “Given that these problems would become only more complicated as our company grew, we realized that we needed to adjust our IT strategy.” 

First Step to a Service-Oriented Architecture
Crutchfield’s key issue had to do with its IT architecture: too much business logic resided at the client level (clients include the Web site or call center application) instead of centralized in the service tier. With centralized service logic, Crutchfield would be able to more easily change its IT systems and deploy new offerings.

For example, Crutchfield’s various sales channels each held disparate order-processing logic. An update to the order-processing workflow would require independent changes to multiple applications, adding cost and possibly introducing technical problems.

Crutchfield wanted to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) where business applications could share a set of centralized services. For its first shared service, Crutchfield planned to consolidate its order-processing for various sales channels.

Solution

Given the order-processing service’s critical nature, Crutchfield asked Microsoft for guidance in implementing Microsoft Web services technologies. Microsoft experts

Fast Facts
Number of applications using shared order-processing service	3
Daily volume of orders processed Q4 2006	3,800
Estimated value of daily orders Q4 2006	U.S.$1.1 million

explained the benefits of Windows® Communication Foundation, which was in beta version at that time. Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft’s unified framework for building secure, reliable, transacted, and interoperable distributed applications.

“Windows Communication Foundation solved our concerns around Web services communications—especially security and reliability—and provided a complete development framework built from the ground up around Web services protocols,” says Hubbard.

Specifically, Windows Communication Foundation simplified the technical details concerning the new order-processing interface and helped Hubbard complete the new service, mostly by himself, in nine months. Tools Hubbard used included Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 with the Windows Communication Foundation designer and the Microsoft Visual C#® programming language. The new order-processing service is hosted on the Internet Information Services 6.0 Web server and also enters data directly into Crutchfield’s customer relationship management database. (See Figure 1.)

“Given that it was my first time using Microsoft Message Queuing, C#, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, developing the new service was a

Figure 1. The new order-processing service architecture.

very positive experience,” says Hubbard. “Microsoft technology supports Web services standards and is widely deployed and documented, all of which helped make my job much easier.”

Crutchfield plans to use Windows Communication Foundation to support its overall SOA strategy. “As we move into the next phase and migrate our entire Web site to Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 and the .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Communication Foundation will play a significant role,” says Steven Weiskircher, Vice President of Information Technology at Crutchfield. “We are looking forward to the further advances that this technology will provide, especially when coupled with future advancements in the Web server embedded in Windows Server®.”

Benefits

Windows Communication Foundation is a critical infrastructure tool that enables Crutchfield to continue developing innovative IT solutions within a flexible framework that can adapt to new business needs.

“With its adherence to advanced Web services specifications and capability provided through configuration files, Windows Communication Foundation significantly improved the speed at which we could develop standards-compliant Web service communication calls. It is an excellent piece of technology that gives us the security, scalability, and flexibility we need for our future enterprise application communications,” says Weiskircher.

Common services, such as our new order-processing service, will allow us to easily integrate new channels when necessary. Hank Hubbard, Senior Programmer Analyst, Crutchfield

Greater Flexibility for New Opportunities
Crutchfield intends to use Windows Communication Foundation to help implement future middle-tier services, such as the order-processing service, that are shared among various business systems. This SOA will allow Crutchfield to add new offerings with less effort, taking advantage of shared services. Service orientation also ensures that changes in one application do not affect the operation of connected applications.

“Service-oriented architecture and Windows Communication Foundation allow us to press our competitive advantage, which is the flexibility to meet customers’ needs with superior service and expertise,” says Hubbard.

Windows Communication Foundation will especially facilitate the launch of new channel offerings, such as the new Canadian e-commerce site. “Common services, such as our new order-processing service, will allow us to easily integrate new channels when necessary,” says Hubbard.

Improved Manageability
Services built with Windows Communication Foundation are easily administered with changes in the configuration files instead of the code itself. Taking a broader view, Windows Communication Foundation helps Crutchfield eliminate extraneous processes.

“Before this project, our process for loading Web orders into the system involved a number of steps that added to complexity and made it difficult for us to manage. The new order service knocks out those extra steps and streamlines things from an architecture standpoint,” says Hubbard.

Reduced Development Effort
Windows Communication Foundation includes a unified programming model that abstracts the technical details involved in building Web services and other point-to-point communications between applications. In the future, Crutchfield programmers will use Windows Communication Foundation to access the various capabilities of Microsoft communications technologies, such as ASP.NET Web services, Web Services Enhancements, .NET Enterprise Services, Microsoft Message Queuing, and Microsoft .NET Remoting.

Low-Risk Approach for the Future
Windows Communication Foundation does not replace, but rather integrates and supplements previous Microsoft communications technologies, allowing Crutchfield to continue using its existing systems and reduce risk while moving to an SOA. Instead of making wholesale changes to its IT environment, Crutchfield can now employ an evolutionary change strategy.

“Although we have definite plans for SOA, business is unpredictable and our plans may change. Windows Communication Foundation allows us to take a slow, measured approach to SOA that reduces risk,” says Hubbard. “At the same time, our IT systems are becoming more agile and we can move faster on new business opportunities. In this sense, Windows Communication Foundation helps to amplify Crutchfield’s competitive advantage.”

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
.NET Framework 3.0 is Microsoft’s managed-code programming model for developing software on the Windows platform. It builds on the .NET Framework 2.0, combining the power of the existing .NET Framework 2.0 application programming interfaces with new technologies for building applications that provide visually stunning user experiences, seamless interoperable communications, and the ability to model a range of business processes. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace technologies. It provides a consistent and familiar development experience, bringing new technology to the millions of developers programming in managed code today.

 

For more information about the .NET Framework 3.0, please go to:
www.microsoft.com/netframework

 

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

 

For more information about Crutchfield products and services, call (434) 817-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.crutchfield.com

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.