4-page Case Study - Posted 10/18/2005

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Farm Credit Services of America

Integration Solution Helps Financial Services Firm Boost Business Volume 20 Percent

Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica) had a variety of disparate customer-related systems that made it impossible to gain a single view of customers. Exchanging updates among those systems necessitated increasingly lengthy batch processes each night and delayed the start of business, requiring employees to find business workarounds to the technology. FCSAmerica replaced its point-to-point connections with Pinwheel, a custom integration solution based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 Enterprise Edition. Information is processed through Pinwheel, stored in a central “customer truth center,” and published back to the customer-related systems. Using this streamlined process, FCSAmerica has increased user productivity by 70 percent. Pinwheel also cuts the time to integrate additional systems by 75 percent.

Situation
Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica), based in Omaha, Nebraska, serves the agricultural credit and financial needs of farmers and ranchers in Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. FCSAmerica has achieved a 10 percent growth rate over the past five years, reaching U.S.$8.5 billion in assets in 2004.

The .NET Framework–based Pinwheel solution is generating even more business volume for us than we’d anticipated. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

To serve its rapidly growing market, FCSAmerica developed a series of customer-related technology systems over the past seven years:

• A loan accounting system is hosted on an IBM 390 mainframe.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) is handled by a third-party application—Pivotal Corporation—running on the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system.
• FCSAmerica branch-office loan officers handle loan origination through a custom application based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
• Dealer loan origination is supported by a Java-based Web application. (FCSAmerica loans are available to customers at farm equipment dealers, much as one might take a loan through an auto dealer to buy a car.)

As a result of using these separate systems for interactions with customers, FCSAmerica lacked a single, comprehensive view of its customers. “Each system was developed to fulfill a specific need, but none was created with regard for the data that it needed to share with the others,” says Beth Schmidt, Director of Applications Development at FCSAmerica. “That created a series of challenges for us, both within the applications and across them.”

For example, the IBM-based accounting system lacked flexible, low-maintenance, real-time processes to access customer data. The CRM application, which was FCSAmerica’s master source of customer data, housed its data in a proprietary format. If FCSAmerica one day wanted to migrate to another CRM solution or use that data for another application, the company would have an “extreme” job in rewriting the information, according to Schmidt.

If a loan officer entered a customer’s information in the CRM system and wanted to originate a loan for that customer the same day, the officer needed to back out of the first system, go to a second system, and reenter the data—a time-consuming and error-prone approach. Not only was this cumbersome for the loan officer, but it also extended the time required to open loans for customers and hindered FCSAmerica’s win rate in its very competitive market segment.

Information was moved primarily through nightly batch processes that transmitted data directly between applications. This activity required a complex structure in which each application had multiple integration lines to the other applications. In addition to having to maintain this complex structure, FCSAmerica was saddled with the business problems associated with nightly batch processes. With information updates, including pricing, taking a day to get to all the systems, up-to-date information was often unavailable to systems when needed. As the nightly batch processes lengthened to handle more data, the challenges were getting bigger.

With the .NET Framework and BizTalk Server, we have achieved tremendous reductions in the time and cost of deploying new systems into our architecture. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

“We were literally running out of hours in a night to run these batch jobs,” says Schmidt. “There were times we were still running processes while we were trying to resume business. That caused delays in getting people started on their work and created further inconveniences for our customers. Our people had to try to create work processes that enabled them to work around the technology issues—which is the last thing we wanted.”

To address these challenges, FCSAmerica wanted to eliminate the need to rekey data into each application. It also wanted to minimize the need for users to access the mainframe, given its relatively difficult-to-use interface. Another goal was to eliminate batch processing and enable the four customer-related systems to view customer changes as they happened, thereby enabling reliable and accurate real-time access to data. Each system needed to be able to enforce its own business rules and data validation policies. Yet FCSAmerica also needed a way to encapsulate rules and validation that were common across the systems and to provide a single point of integration for all the systems—a solution that would replace the complex structure of multiple point-to-point connections.

“We set a goal to adopt a solution that would be flexible enough to grow with us,” says Schmidt. “We wanted to provide customer-centric service today and lay the groundwork for integrating additional services, such as loan and appraisal data, in the future.”

Solution

Working with Quilogy, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Farm Credit Services of America addressed its needs with Pinwheel, a Microsoft .NET Framework–based application that replaces the old point-to-point connections with a single integration point for the four customer-related systems—and any others that FCSAmerica might want to add in the future. FCSAmerica calls the integration solution “Pinwheel” because a diagram of the system architecture resembles a child’s pinwheel, in which each of the perimeter components connects to a central core. With Pinwheel, FCSAmerica realized its vision of an environment in which applications can be added or subtracted as needs change. A loosely coupled design, which replaces the point-to-point connections of the former solution, makes this infrastructure possible.

To ensure that Pinwheel provides the integration, reliability, and expandability that FCSAmerica wants, including the ability to develop incrementally over time to meet future needs, Quilogy built the solution on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that treats services as components that work together as required to accomplish business goals. (See the Solution Architecture section later in this document.) Pinwheel is based on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, including Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 Enterprise Edition. The solution offers generic interfaces, standard XML-formatted data, and loosely coupled document transfer.

Users don’t need to learn a new application to take advantage of Pinwheel. Users see the results of Pinwheel’s automatic integration as they interact with FCSAmerica’s existing systems.

Typically, users—who are customer-facing loan officers or dealers—begin their interaction with the systems by starting the customer relationship management application and opening or creating a customer record. From the start screen, users can go directly to the loan origination application or any of the other Pinwheel–connected applications. Clicking the loan origination application takes users directly to the record for the customer they were viewing in the CRM application—and even to the transaction they were viewing—without users having to conduct a redundant search for the information.

Benefits

Pinwheel has helped increase the loan business at Farm Credit Services of America by 20 percent by increasing productivity and time for customer interaction. The solution has helped improve user productivity by 70 percent and cut the company’s time to integrate new systems by 75 percent.

Business Up 20 Percent

Pinwheel achieved profitability for FCSAmerica in its first six weeks of operation. Employees generated new business after the introduction of the Pinwheel integration solution helped them increase their productivity by streamlining processes and showing a more comprehensive view of every customer. The increase totaled $650 million in new loan business. With average daily loan business at $12 million, compared with $10 million a day last year, FCSAmerica sees an increase of 20 percent attributable to the greater productivity made possible by Pinwheel’s efficiencies.

[More business volume] is a direct result of the solution’s ability to give us timely and accurate loan pricing information as well as more time to interact with our customers. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

“The .NET Framework–based Pinwheel solution is generating even more business volume for us than we’d anticipated,” says Schmidt. “This is a direct result of the solution’s ability to give us timely and accurate loan pricing information as well as more time to interact with our customers.”

Schmidt notes that business rules hosted in the BizTalk Server 2004 portion of the solution give loan officers and dealers up-to-date pricing information for new loans, rather than forcing them to wait for a batch process to deliver information that might be up to a day old. As a result, FCSAmerica can offer more accurate and competitive prices, and doing so is leading to an increase in business.

“With better pricing information, FCSAmerica’s financial team can do a better job of managing pricing risk and fluctuations,” Schmidt says. For example, a loan officer now can see a rate change in real time and can make the change before a loan closes.

In addition, because loan officers can originate customer loans more quickly and accurately, officers have more time to interact with those customers and cross-sell additional loan products. For example, after originating a home loan, the officers can talk to their customers about insurance, crop protection, or equipment loans.

Productivity Up 70 Percent

FCSAmerica estimates that the new solution boosts productivity by 70 percent among the approximately 600 employees involved in loan activities. That increase results from streamlining in several key areas:

• Users can now update a customer record once in one system, and the information is automatically shared with the others. That eliminates the time-consuming redundancy and error-prone process of requiring users to back out of a system to manually rekey the update in the next system.
• Workflow enhancements greatly streamline user interaction with the systems. Among these process improvements are the ability to start the loan origination application from the customer relationship management screen, and the ability to automatically see the correct customer and transaction.

The increased productivity means an annual savings of $167,000 for FCSAmerica, based on an extrapolation of initial productivity data and average cost per loan decision. Even more importantly, by enabling loan officers to originate loans more quickly, officers can generate the 20 percent increase in loan volume cited above.

“We see the .NET Framework–based Pinwheel solution making our people more productive, freeing them to generate significantly more revenue,” says Schmidt. “And because the greater productivity translates into more accurate and timely information, our customers have more confidence in us.”

System Integration Time Cut 75 Percent

In addition to providing direct business benefits to FCSAmerica, the Microsoft .NET Framework–based Pinwheel solution also makes it easier for the FCSAmerica IT operation to support the company’s business goals on a continuing basis. For example, with Pinwheel, FCSAmerica has cut the time needed to integrate a new application by 75 percent, from four weeks to one. That’s thanks to the loosely coupled SOA design and use of BizTalk Server 2004.

We can expand the solution more quickly and easily to meet business needs and to increase our competitiveness. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

“With the .NET Framework and BizTalk Server, we have achieved tremendous reductions in the time and cost of deploying new systems into our architecture,” says Schmidt. “That means we can expand the solution more quickly and easily to meet business needs and to increase our competitiveness.”

The solution also makes it faster and easier for FCSAmerica to modify business rules with minimal development effort to meet new business needs.

Solution Architecture

The Pinwheel integration solution contains all of the business rules and validation procedures that are specific to FCSAmerica. Previously, each of the four customer-related systems, with its own database and business rules, had limited ability to share information.

Pinwheel now contains all customer information, ensuring that the customer data meets the business rules and that all subscribing systems have the most current information. With Pinwheel hosting this functionality, FCSAmerica can make changes to the CRM, accounting, or loan origination systems without having to rearchitect the infrastructure surrounding the exchange of customer data.

Figure 1: The Pinwheel architecture centres on BizTalk Server to integrate FCSA’s customer systems.

By taking advantage of the service-oriented architecture approach, Pinwheel integrates customer information, rather than specific system databases with varying database structures. The data and business rules of each of the four preexisting systems remain decoupled from Pinwheel. With the SOA approach, each system can submit documents to Pinwheel, and receive documents from it, without Pinwheel’s core business components (central processing orchestrations) having any knowledge of the publishing or subscribing processes.

SOA also enables Pinwheel to do more than replicate data across systems; for example, it synchronizes data among the systems, preventing multiple systems from publishing a change to the same customer record at the same time.

System Adapters for Authentication, Connectivity

Authentication to each system is retained in the “system adapter” that connects that system to Pinwheel. This approach supports the different authentication requirements for each system and gives FCSAmerica the flexibility to add, change, or remove systems without needing a single authentication model to service all implementations. Each of the systems talks to its own implementation of the system adapter using one of a variety of communications methodologies including Message Queuing (also known as MSMQ), polling, database queries, and HostBridge software (on the mainframe), depending on the specific needs and capabilities of the system.

Connectivity is enabled through these system adapters, rather than directly in Pinwheel or its Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 component. Implementing the authentication and connectivity functions outside Pinwheel reduces the complexity of the system and enhances its flexibility.

All of the system adapters communicate with Pinwheel using Microsoft .NET Remoting and passing XML documents that represent their view of customer data. FCSAmerica and Quilogy chose .NET Remoting for the speed that it provides for “out of process” calls. The architecture also provides the flexibility to incorporate Web services as desired. Pinwheel communicates back to the system adapters by passing messages to private queues using Message Queuing.

A Two-Part Solution

The service-oriented architecture of Pinwheel is built on two components: the Pinwheel Framework and BizTalk Server.

Pinwheel Framework

The Pinwheel Framework consists of multiple Microsoft Windows Services, custom-built by Quilogy and FCSAmerica, that provide some of the solution’s common application services, including structured database access, centralized exception management, instrumentation, enterprise application monitoring, and event notification. A Windows Service is an application that runs unattended, typically on an application server, and does not provide a user interface. These applications are usually configured to start with the operating system.

Because the greater productivity translates into more accurate and timely information, our customers have more confidence in us. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

The Windows Services in Pinwheel provide predefined business functions to the BizTalk Server orchestrations. Because these functions are implemented in Windows Services, they are always available to the orchestrations and help avoid complexity in BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server allows FCSAmerica infrastructure components to work together and makes possible use of modular systems that can be added and removed as needed. FCSAmerica and Quilogy used BizTalk Server as an abstraction layer for data, business rules, and decoupling of system integrations. By enforcing a single point of entry for document submissions into Pinwheel, the architects were able to avoid connectivity problems.

BizTalk Server provides intersystem integration through orchestrations that provide business logic to meet the specific needs—including data formatting, code lookups, and document transformations—of each of the four FCSAmerica systems. The BizTalk Server publish/subscribe model of document processing allows FCSAmerica to achieve its decoupled architecture (a key tenet of service orientation) because document subscriptions replace direct calls from system to system. BizTalk Server also facilitates maintenance because, with each system having its own container of business logic, modifications can be made to one system without affecting the others.

Solution Walk-Through

An overview of the solution is provided in Figure 1. The four preexisting systems are shown at the top of the diagram. Each of the systems publishes updates to customer information. These updates are sent in XML format using .NET Remoting to the Pinwheel Customer Document Windows Service, which provides an entry point into Pinwheel for all systems to submit customer documents and then controls the document processing within Pinwheel. The Customer Document Service ensures that documents are processed in the correct order, that all systems have acknowledged each customer change, and that only one change per customer is processed at a time.

We can expand the solution more quickly and easily to meet business needs and to increase our competitiveness. Beth Schmidt Director of Applications Development, Farm Credit Services of America

A copy of each update is sent to a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database for tracking purposes. The update is also published to a Recovery Document Windows Service and, from there, to a recovery database. This backup is crucial if administrators need to do a “warm backup” on data less than 15 minutes old. (Data more than 15 minutes old is backed up to a separate recovery site using log shipping.)

When a document is signaled to be processed, it is submitted to BizTalk Server using a “file receive location” (file pickup). After a document is in BizTalk Server, all orchestration communication is done using the publish/subscribe model. The orchestrations will subscribe to different schema definitions and apply the appropriate processing logic.

BizTalk Server orchestrations identify current updates and route the updates so they can be shared with each of the other systems, as appropriate. Updates confirmed for processing are published to Common Customer Orchestrations that do validation checks on the information and save the updates to the “customer truth center,” the central repository of customer data for all applications in the solution.

The information is then provided to applications that subscribe to it; for example, the CRM system would want updated customer address information from the loan origination system in order to update its own record for that customer. The subscribing orchestrations determine which updates will be published to each of the subscribing systems; for example, the mainframe accounting system will not accept updates on prospects that are not yet actual customers, although this data will be accepted by the CRM system.

Technical Challenges

In creating a single infrastructure to integrate its four customer-related applications, FCSAmerica faced at least two key challenges: to coordinate the processing of data from each of the applications and to provide visibility into the new infrastructure so that FCSAmerica could track how well that coordination was working.

Coordinating the Data

Pinwheel receives customer updates from four systems: the IBM 390 accounting system, the third-party Windows-based CRM system, the Microsoft .NET Framework–based loan origination system, and the Java Web-based dealer loan origination system. The Quilogy and FCSAmerica team faced the challenge of controlling and coordinating the updates from each of those systems as the updates entered Pinwheel.

The development group needed to ensure that new customer documents were added to Pinwheel before it attempted to implement an update, that all subscribing systems acknowledged each customer change, and that change documents to an existing record were processed in the order in which they were received.

To meet these needs, the development group created the Customer Document Windows Service, which uses .NET Remoting, BizTalk Server, and SQL Server custom tables to control the processing of customer records.

The Customer Document Service processes each document on a “first-come, first-serve” basis. When the document is received, the service determines if there are any other documents for that customer record currently being processed by BizTalk Server. If there are not, the service will route the document to BizTalk Server using a file receive location. BizTalk Server will then store the document in the MessageBox database and will allow the appropriate publishing orchestrations to process the customer information. If the service determines that BizTalk Server is already processing a document for that customer record, the new document is stored in custom SQL Server tables until the BizTalk Server processing for that customer is complete.

Visibility into the Solution

The Pinwheel development group also faced the challenge of providing visibility into the solution to see a document’s status at every key point in the Pinwheel process. Because of the complexity of the BizTalk Server orchestrations used by Pinwheel, just knowing whether or not a document completed the orchestration process was insufficient. Developers wanted to provide a way for administrators to know where a document was in the orchestration process so that those administrators could monitor system performance and quickly identify errors in document handling that needed their attention.

To address this challenge, the Pinwheel developers used Quilogy’s reusable .NET Framework-based components to create an “eventing” mechanism used within the BizTalk Server orchestrations. The eventing mechanism sends document status information in standard Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) messaging format. WMI is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), an initiative to establish standards for accessing and sharing management information over an enterprise network.

The use of WMI messaging enables FCSAmerica to monitor the processing status by using any standard monitoring tool, such as Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. WMI messaging also has minimal impact on orchestration performance.

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