Chapter 24: Project Case Study - Creating the Purchase Management Application

In this chapter, you'll learn how to use XML to provide an efficient solution for the Purchasing department of a fictional car manufacturer called WeMakeCars, Inc. WeMakeCars has a number of business partners, such as suppliers. The current business scenario involves frequent exchange of information between these partners. As a result, WeMakeCars needs a fast and reliable communication medium to reduce the time cycle involved in these transactions. While XML has emerged as a good medium for data exchange, ColdFusion provides easy-to-use functions that work with XML documents.

WeMakeCars, Inc. Purchase Management Application—The Current Issues and the Proposed Solution

Over the years, WeMakeCars has introduced several car models to the market. Although the company hasn't faced any problems in the past, the increasing competition in the car market requires it to work more efficiently and accurately.

WeMakeCars has three production setups across the country, each of which has a Purchasing department. The Production department uses a centralized Production Management application to send material requisitions to the Purchasing department. The Production department has a centralized database, which places all requisitions in a table that can be accessed by all of the Purchasing departments. The currently used Purchasing application isn't integrated with the Production Management application. Requisitions are printed and forwarded to the Purchasing department, where they're sorted manually.

The company has three production setups and more than 15 suppliers. Each production setup has a separate set of suppliers. A large number of components are used to manufacture each car. The new system must carry out an accurate analysis of the supply and demand of car components at each production setup.

The heavy demand for cars ensures that the Purchasing department is always under pressure. Since running the Production department involves a large amount of paperwork, there's always the chance of error. The major problems faced by the Purchasing department are

• Manual sorting of requisitions is necessary to generate purchase orders for suppliers.

• Making a large number of purchase orders for the suppliers is a time-consuming process.

• Printing purchase orders to be sent to suppliers wastes a lot of time.

• Suppliers have to convert the purchase orders to electronic format, which is time-consuming.

• The invoice sent by the supplier is in paper form and has to be converted to electronic format by the Purchasing departments.

• The movement of data between various formats increases the chance of errors.

• The management of the paperwork results in wastage of resources.

The management at WeMakeCars is aware of the shortcomings of the current process. To work out an appropriate solution, an in-house team of software professionals is selected, along with a team from the Purchasing department. The major issues they face include integrating the Production Management applications, reducing paperwork, and providing features for data exchange with suppliers.

Since the company already uses a ColdFusion-based Production application, the team decides to develop a common ColdFusion MX-based application for the different Purchasing departments. The team visits the suppliers and reviews their applications for data-exchange issues. They conclude that data could be exchanged in the XML format. The proposed ColdFusion MX application will use the existing database of the Production Management application, which is an SQL server database. One of the main advantages of using XML is that different applications can use it for data exchange. This also saves time and reduces paperwork.

These are the advantages expected of the new application:

• Requisition data will be available in the database in an easy-to-use format. The Production Management application will generate this data.

• Orders will be generated automatically for selected suppliers, based on the requisitions.

• Purchase orders will be sent by e-mail to suppliers in an XML format. Suppliers will import this information into their applications and send an invoice to WeMakeCars in the XML format. These invoices will then be imported to the company's database.

• XML will help in data exchange between all suppliers, regardless of the application. It will also save time and reduce paperwork.