Before diving into the scenario, you first need to understand each employee's role and responsibility within the company's organization. Our focus in this example is on a small sample of the employees, though their roles are representative of many other employees within the company.
As we work through the scenario you'll see links to the associated key On Demand Workplace components describe later in the article.
Our example company is organized geographically with a manager assigned to each region, or geographic collection of restaurants. The regional manager is Rachel Stamey, who works out of her home office and spends a lot of time commuting between and visiting the restaurants within her region.
One of Rachel's restaurant managers is Vic Sargent. He is responsible for the day-to-day operations of his restaurant, under Rachel's guidance. He is a salaried employee with additional bonuses that are linked to the performance of his restaurant. Vic manages several hourly employees. Employees with some management responsibility are considered assistant managers. Vic has three assistant managers: Megan Nussbaum, William Woolf, and Johnny Farrell.
Vic also has associates Mildred Mackie and Bob Simpson. The role of the hourly employee includes kitchen staff, wait staff, and bar staff. (Of course, there are actually more than two hourly employees in Vic's restaurant, but only a couple are needed for the scenario because their roles are similar to other hourly employees.)
We also have stock control specialist Joanne Briggs, who works at the corporate level and is located at the corporation's headquarters. Her responsibility includes managing the supply chain for the restaurants.
This section reviews a day in the life of these fictional employees.
On Monday morning, Vic Sargent, restaurant manager of the International Foods and Beverages in central Raleigh, North Carolina, arrives at work. He begins his day by looking for any exceptional issues that require his immediate attention. He opens his e-mail to find a late-night message from assistant manager Megan Nussbaum. Megan, who has also copied the regional HR Service Center, reports that Johnny Farrell, a team leader, suddenly quit last night. (See Collaboration.) Because Johnny had access to the supply chain management system, Vic is concerned about the possibility of unauthorized access and immediately disables Johnny's access to the employee portal and all enterprise applications. (See Identity management.)
Vic has a busy restaurant, especially with upcoming basketball games in the area, and must replace Johnny right away. The HR Service Center has already identified three candidates to replace Johnny. Vic selects two and requests that the Service Center arrange interviews for them. Since the candidates are not currently employed and are local, Vic is able to conduct the interviews the same day, select a candidate, and make a job offer for the candidate to start that evening. (See Human capital management.)
Meanwhile, Vic has been reviewing other aspects of his daily routine. Looking at the task management system, he notes that a stock check is due today to prepare for an upcoming order to his supplier. Vic assigns the stock check to William Woolf, who will be the duty manager later in the afternoon. Vic also assigns other miscellaneous tasks to employees who are scheduled to work today. (See Task management.)
William arrives to work, reviews the tasks on the point-of-sale terminal, and realizes he needs to do a stock inventory. William gets one of the personal digital assistants (PDAs), goes to the stock room, and logs on to the employee portal for accessing the supply chain system. The employee portal recognizes William's authority to access the supply chain system and logs him on. William's restaurant has a radio frequency (RF) network and the PDAs are RF-capable, so he can work in a connected, interactive environment. (See Task management.)
William reviews the list of items (cases of beverages and various sundries) to inventory and specifies the appropriate count for each. Upon submitting the counts, the inventory application refreshes with a list of items whose actual counts disagree with the book stock quantity. The items where the count agreed with the system figure are removed from the display. Finally, William marks the inventory task as being completed. (See Business process integration.)
Vic reviews his key performance indicators (KPIs) next, and notes that his profit is less than expected because his sales number is less than the target figure. Vic does not understand why the figures are off, and decides to explore further. He notes that his boss, Rachel, is currently working from home and is logged into the employee portal. Vic fires off a quick, instant message. (See Key performance indicators.)
Rachel, of course, has also reviewed the previous day's sales figures and noticed sales were off at all the restaurants in her region. Rachel pulls up the sales figure reports for the restaurants in her region and prepares to send them to Vic in response to his request. She observes that the ACC basketball tournament finals have increased sales in residential areas but have reduced sales in workplace-based restaurants, which is the core of her district, due to an extra bank holiday. Rachel fires back an instant message noting that sales were off as a whole, and Vic should have those wider-scope reports soon. (See Key performance indicators and Collaboration.)
As soon as Vic gets Rachel's instant message, he reviews the reports Rachel has shared and realizes, in fact, that his sales were better than other restaurants. There was little he could have done to improve the situation. Vic is concerned about his sales and profit targets, because his compensation is directly tied to them. He can receive daily feedback on his restaurant's performance and how it directly affects his compensation using the bonus calculator, a simple, visual chart that shows the relationship between restaurant performance and management compensation. (See Human capital management.)
In the afternoon the newly hired employee, Bob Simpson, arrives. He is experienced in the restaurant business, having worked for a local competitor. Vic has asked Bob to step up and be immediately responsible for the stock room, including the same supply chain management activities that Johnny previously had. (See Task management.) The HR Service Center already has Bob's basic information in the HR system, including his home address, and allocates an employee number as soon as Vic confirms his selection and Bob's acceptance. Once the HR representative enters Bob's information, it is also available to the employee portal and other enterprise applications. However, Bob's credentials to access the portal still need to be activated, so Vic looks up his employees, finds Bob's entry, and enables his access. (See Human capital management and Identity management.)
Bob can now log on to the employee portal, and can review and correct any personal information. Bob also needs to update his tax information. He reviews his address and phone number, notices that a couple of digits are transposed, and corrects the number. He also adds his personal e-mail address so he can be reached more easily. (See Human capital management.) Because he is newly hired, Bob's task list shows the standard "Pathways to Success" training program and he begins the first module, which includes core values and competencies, and the required reading on health and safety. (See "training" in Human capital management.)
Bob proceeds to look at his new supply chain management activities, and notices that the process is slightly different from his previous job. He decides to use the Knowledge Management tool to search for an article about the program. When the articles come up he notices that Joanne Briggs has written most of the pertinent articles. Bob notes Joanne's availability and asks her a question about the article using instant messaging. Joanne responds with an answer that allows him to continue. She also refers him to another article that will walk him through the process. (See Knowledge management.)
A member of the wait staff, Mildred Mackie, reports to work that evening. Knowing that schedules are published every Monday, she reviews her schedule for the following week. Basic applications, like employee schedules, that typically provide public information are available through the point-of-sale terminal that has a touch-enabled flavor of the portal. (See Workforce management.) Mildred checks her personal sales performance compared to her peers, and sees that she is second in overall appetizers per cover. Next she notices a corporate news item that explains a new appetizer has been introduced effective immediately, so she decides she can leverage the new starter to bump her sales to number one within the restaurant, hopefully to win the monthly employee bonus. (See Key performance indicators.) Finally, Mildred reviews her schedule for the week, selects the option to print the schedule, and switches to the point-of-sale software so she can begin taking orders. (See Workforce management.)
Unannounced, Rachel visits part of her restaurant circuit in the evening to evaluate the satisfaction of the customers. At each restaurant, she randomly approaches the patrons, asks a few basic questions to gauge their satisfaction, and records the result on her PDA. At the end of the evening, Rachel synchronizes her PDA with the employee portal that records the result of the customer satisfaction survey, against which she can view reports the next morning. (See Business process integration.)
Weekly management performance reviews
The next morning, Rachel Stamey begins by reviewing the most recent trading figures. She starts with the basic measures for her restaurants: sales, cost of goods, and cost of labor. The sales figures were better than expected, but the cost of labor figures are disproportionately high, and highlighted in red, to indicate they are above an acceptable threshold. The numbers are perhaps an absolute number or a computed measure, based on various statistical factors (such as labor cost >23% of sales). Beginning with the highlighted cost of labor figure, Rachel drills down to try to locate the source of the high labor costs. (See Key performance indicators.)
Having reviewed the reports, Rachel is ready to hold her weekly district performance review meeting. Each of Rachel's restaurant managers join her in an electronic meeting where she reviews the sales figures, celebrates best achievements, analyzes underperformance, and coaches the management team on techniques for growing the business. The restaurant management team also shares their experience of what has worked and what has not. (See Key performance indicators and Collaboration.)
On Demand Workplace Components
The story presented eight high-level business scenarios that we'll explore in greater detail in this section. Part 1 identified the components for the On Demand Workplace, and related them to specific customer issues, or pain points. (Read Part 1 to get a better perspective of the pain points and the definition of the components.) Now we'll relate each component to the scenario, and present a high-level view of the enabling technologies.
- Business task
- Identity management addresses the concerns of system access by providing credentials to authorized users. It is unlikely that a large business would buy all their applications, middleware, hardware, and other IT assets from a single vendor. Even if the infrastructure were purchased from a single vendor, it is also unlikely that a single security model with a single security policy is implemented across all vendors' technologies. A typical enterprise is built over time, incrementally, with products from multiple vendors introducing multiple security models. As the number of disparate security models grows, the cost of managing security policies, credentials, and access control lists grows as well. And, the user experience can become more complicated as users must remember additional credentials for each system they access.
The business need for identity management is to reduce the overhead costs to both the system administrator and end user by providing a single point of control for credential management, and providing users a seamless experience when being authenticated (who you are) and authorized (what can you see) to use those systems.
- Enabling technology
- Efficiently and effectively managing user authentication and authorization require a single point of control for administration, authorization, and authentication requests. On the administrative side, Tivoli security products provide the system administrator with a suite of tools that enable management of credentials from a single point of control. These tools work in concert with both IBM and non-IBM security models.
A seamless, integrated experience is also necessary, or users would need to provide the credentials again and again as they move from one system to another. The IBM On Demand Workplace portal provides a single point of access to back-end applications and content in a personalized and customized manner. The portal works in conjunction with Tivoli's security manager, Access Manager, to provide the credential mapping and single sign-on functions required to help the portal provide a seamless, integrated experience.
- Business task
- People management encompasses human capital management and workforce management. Human capital management addresses the issues around attracting, hiring, and retaining employees, and managing their benefits and compensation.
As noted in Part 1, there is extraordinarily high turnover of employees within the retail industry. Recruiting, hiring, and training new employees is expensive for the management team and takes away from their floor time -- time spent helping to meet customer needs. In the scenario, Vic recruited, hired, and trained his new employee Bob by collaborating with the HR service center. Paper-driven business processes, or those business processes involving an intermediary such as an employee's manager, are typically error-prone and time consuming in terms of labor involved and time to execute the workflow. Self-service is illustrated several times in our scenario, such as when Bob updated his personal information when he was hired, and when Vic reviewed the status of his bonus.
By providing direct electronic access, the IBM On Demand Workplace reduces personnel overhead, cuts material costs, and delivers accurate results. The employee may review and update their personal information, compensation details, or simply answer questions regarding their benefits in a timely manner, without waiting for a manager or other intermediary to help.
Finally, you saw multiple instances of employees reviewing their performance and pay. Both Vic and Mildred received additional pay based on individual performance goals: overall restaurant-level profit and expenses measures for Vic, and basic appetizers sold per customer for Mildred. Both had access to the performance and pay feedback through the IBM On Demand Workplace.
- Enabling technology
- The IBM On Demand Workplace integrates tightly with leading HR applications such as PeopleSoft HR and Employease (see Resources for links). You can integrate the user interface -- the presentation layer -- using out-of-the-box portlets, or by rapidly developing portlets using WebSphere Portal Application Integrator (Application Integrator). Application Integrator lets the business analyst rapidly produce business-oriented applications, such as self-service portlets for leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, without a need to understand programming concepts or write Java code. Application Integrator generates portlets using a simple, wizard-driven interface. Other tools are available that help the IT organization rapidly develop and deploy the views necessary to enable an employee for self-service.
The portal interface in the IBM On Demand Workplace can also provide access to filtered content based on user role and identity. The customization and personalization services are exposed in many of the aforementioned programming tools.
- Business task
- Task management lets the business be sure that the right tasks are assigned to the right individual at the right time. Managers must be able to monitor the status of tasks, and respond appropriately if scheduled tasks do not meet the desired schedule. Restaurants are expected to plan and prioritize tasks that are both internally and externally generated. Externally generated tasks require significant coordination of communication and materials between the corporate office and the rest of the company. There are several task management functions in the scenario:
- Vic assigns tasks to his employees
- Employees such as William view the assigned tasks and update the tasks management system with the latest status
- Vic reassigns a task to Bob Simpson, the new employee.
- Enabling technology
- An On Demand Workplace lets a company manage tasks more effectively. A restaurant manager can log on to an On Demand workplace and view the tasks assigned to employees. Tasks assigned by the corporate office are visible without having to access a different system. The manager can view the status of tasks, assign tasks, and close tasks.
Restaurant employees can use the On Demand workplace to determine what tasks have been assigned to them and update the status appropriately. This modified status can be seen immediately by the restaurant manager and those at the corporate office. This is possible by integrating a task management system into the portal.
Single sign-on between the portal and task management system needs to be implemented, and user identity across the different systems needs to be properly managed. Integrating the different technologies this way lets users access task-related activities that are pertinent to their role using any device at any location, and lets them get a clear perspective of the tasks across the entire corporation.
- Business task
- Retailers have a variety of complex business processes within their enterprise. These include stock (or inventory) management, receiving, loss prevention, and customer service. Our scenario had examples of stock management and customer service. Inventory is one of the key control points of the business. As Max Muller states in his book, Essentials of Inventory Management (Amacom Publishers, 2003), "Inventory is money." A small change in inventory controls can realize a large savings in cost of goods sold and capital expenses. Retailers need to manage inventory both strategically and at the operational level.
From the operational perspective, retailers face considerable issues of product slippage due to damage, errors in the supply chain, and theft. Paper-based processes create challenges for maintaining inventory and ensuring adequate amounts of product are on hand. Inventory is both a real (product on the shelves) and a paper entity. Reconciliation of mismatches between the paper and the real can be difficult.
From the strategic perspective, inventory is a primary control that should be managed in support of corporate balance scorecard strategies using KPIs. Some KPIs for inventory include:
- Inventory turns: the number of times a given product is replaced in inventory each year
- Days of inventory: the number of days at the projected sales rate that is in stock
- K factor: the inventory carrying costs.
The more effectively retailers manage stock, the more they need systems to accurately and efficiently track inventory and product usage to enable responsive stock-replenishment (to avoid both having too much stock on hand, or running out of stock).
In the scenario, William quickly did inventory by using a PDA with a scanning device to count stock in the supply room. Stock count is delivered in near real-time, thus enabling quick adjustments to stock orders.
- Enabling technology
- The IBM On Demand Workplace for retail integrates with leading supply chain applications to deliver electronic-based inventory management applications. Using the On Demand Workplace's portal technology, the application views are further extended to leading, wireless pervasive devices designed for the retail environment, such as those offered by Symbol. By using native device services such as bar code readers or radio frequency identification (RFID) receivers, the process may be even more automated and less prone to error.
The supply chain application can act as a node in a larger, choreographed business process tied together by the IBM On Demand Workplace business integration technologies. Those technologies include a business process modeler and monitor. The modeler lets business analysts model and simulate business processes. Once deployed, execution of actual business processes may be monitored to determine if further business process tuning is necessary.
The IBM On Demand Workplace for retail incorporates analytical capabilities into the manager's desktop, giving them real-time visibility into strategic performance indicators for managing inventory. Together with integrated business processes and wireless capabilities, they can respond to deviations from their performance targets through integrated delivery and stockroom management operations.
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Business task
- Vic's compensation is directly linked to the financial performance benchmarks of his restaurant. Restaurant managers can typically manage the single largest, controllable expense -- the cost of labor. However, without linkages between labor expense and the revenue of the restaurant for a given period, controlling labor expense amounts to little more than guessing.
Near real-time information lets the manager see correlations between his restaurant revenue with linkages to labor costs. The manager may adjust employee working hours, call in extra people, or cancel shifts using prescriptive, formulaic methods to more effectively manage his profit figures in a repeatable, controllable fashion.
You saw Vic reviewing figures to understand the cause-and-effect of his restaurant's financial performance. Without the benefit of his business intelligence systems, it could have been weeks or months before Vic had any idea how his restaurant performed.
- Enabling technology
- Data warehouses and other data stores built using IBM's Data Management products provide the foundation for collecting, aggregating, and analyzing information that is delivered to company management. The data originates from multiple sources: the restaurant scheduling application for labor data, the point of sale applications for sales data, and the supply chain application for materials cost, for example. The database acts as the central collection point for all this disparate information and puts the data in a form that enables efficient reporting.
Once the data is collected, it must be summarized into useful, meaningful data that is readily understood. Any number of applications such as Business Objects, Crystal Decisions, and AlphaBlox can work through the IBM On Demand Workplace portal to provide concise reports in numbers or pictures. These applications also include report creation and publishing features to enable the near real-time reporting necessary to manage business profit objectives.
- Business task
- Collaboration, as a form of communication, lets employees rapidly interact one-on-one or as virtual teams. Because of the organizational structure of our fictitious company, multiple forms of electronic communication are needed to interactively manage the business. Forms of collaboration include instant messaging, online team rooms, and e-mail.
Different types of collaboration are used in many instances in our scenario. Vic and Rachel used instant messaging to discuss sales figures one-on-one. Rachel held a meeting with her management staff of each of her restaurants without requiring those managers to be physically present in the same location. Vic received urgent messages on his desktop to notify him of issues requiring his attention. When an issue is high priority, the alert is delivered with an interface that will most likely get Vic's attention.
- Enabling technology
- IBM's On Demand Workplace offers multiple technologies to enable various forms of collaboration among employees. Instant messaging, virtual team rooms, and e-meeting capabilities are essential components of an On Demand Workplace, and are offered by the Lotus components.
On the back end, subscription channels are linked to delivery channels to effectively manage what content should be delivered and how it should be delivered. For example, a news story about the company may not warrant an instant message to a pervasive device because wireless bandwidth is expensive. Rather, it should be delivered to the subscriber's e-mail inbox. A high priority problem, however, would likely require an alert to be delivered as quickly as possibly to the end user. The Instant Notification Services (INS) of WebSphere Everyplace Access offers the services necessary to assemble these delivery and subscription channels.
- Business task
- Providing employees access to the right information at the right time is critical. This is, unfortunately, often not possible because employees have problems locating the information they need in the mountains of data that need to be searched. Even if the information is located, the employee may not know what to do with it if they are unable to locate the expertise required to answer their questions.
New employee Bob quickly located the information he needed because of the knowledge management system that was in place. The knowledge management system also lets him directly contact experts in the areas where he has questions and get them resolved quickly.
- Enabling technology
- An On Demand Workplace lets users log on and quickly locate the information required to work effectively. This is because the underlying component tracks all the information that users need from multiple sources such as e-mail, file servers, databases and collaboration platforms, without users having to publish anything explicitly to a knowledge repository. The information is used to build a summary of what a user knows and does, as well as build user profiles based on the documents that a user views and writes. Personal information such as affinities, expertise, education, and job function are also tracked and incorporated into a user profile that the system maintains and provides as search criteria. Online availability is also provided so users can chat to the appropriate individual if there are any questions about the information that is retrieved.
- Business task
- Properly managing the workforce within the company is critical to the success of the company. Workforce management includes managing the time and attendance of the employees. Schedules need to be generated and revised based upon availability of employees. It is also important for management to compensate employees based on their attendance, and identify inefficiencies with the current scheduling mechanism. To do this, management needs to have access to appropriate performance reports that will let them make the right decisions around scheduling. These reports will also permit management to plan, forecast, and budget appropriately to ensure that the correct employees are available to enable the company to function properly.
- Enabling technology
- Most of the above tasks are currently done on paper. Doing it electronically can greatly improve workforce management and reduce costs. Several applications are available that permit workforce management within a restaurant. Integrating the applications into the On Demand Workplace will let the company more effectively schedule employees and plan for future needs.
This article offers a slice of the organization within our fictitious company, and looks at some of the employees and their roles. We showed a piece of their typical workday, identifying On Demand Workplace components for the activities within the scenario. We also listed those components, with some high-level thoughts on the enabling technologies from IBM's On Demand Workplace.
In Part 3 of our series we dive deeper into the technical side of an IBM On Demand Workplace by describing how the enabling technologies above map against the e-business architecture patterns to create an architecture for the company's On Demand Workplace solution.
- Visit
IBM On Demand Workplace at IBM Consulting Services for more details about the On Demand Workplace, or go to IBM On Demand Workplace for retail to learn more about IBM's retail flavor of the On Demand Workplace.
- Visit the
WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Studio zones on developerWorks WebSphere for comprehensive information on how to acquire and use IBM's suite of tools for application development.
- Download a trial version of WebSphere Studio and give it a try for your application development needs. Or, use a developerWorks Subscription to download a copy of WebSphere Portal.
- Consult the IBM Redbook,
A Portal Composite Pattern Using WebSphere Portal V5, for details about designing and architecting a portal solution.
- Visit the PeopleSoft and Employease sites for more information.
- Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
Sam McHan is a senior software engineer with the On Demand Solution Center in Research Triangle Park, NC with focus on building large enterprise and SMB mid-market vertical industry solutions. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family. You can contact Sam at srmchan@us.ibm.com.
John Medicke is the chief architect of the On Demand Solution Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. He has worked in industry solution development for last seven years across various industries, including financial services, retail, health care, industrial, and government. He is the author of the book Integrated Solutions with DB2 as well as multiple articles in various journals. You can contact John at medicke@us.ibm.com.
Mathews Thomas is a consultant IT architect at IBM's Global eBusiness Solution Center and has focused on architecting, designing and developing On Demand Workplaces for the Distribution sector over the last two years. You can contact Mathews at matthom@us.ibm.com.
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