Betting on SOA at the City of Las Vegas

Business Challenge
The purpose of the SOA initiative was to automate the synchronization of information between the City of Las Vegas’ Oracle Financial System and SPL EAM for the Water Pollution Control Facility. Prior to deploying this solution, the City was manually entering transactions in both systems to replenish inventory and redundantly capturing time entries. The City wanted to bring together divisions that had previously been isolated because of incompatible technologies. The City Manager’s Office decided to introduce Service-Oriented Architecture using Oracle Fusion Middleware to integrate the City’s Enterprise Applications.

Solution
The City utilized Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to standardize and centralize integration between the City’s Oracle E-Business Suite and its SPL application used for utility maintenance management. These integrations include Requisitions, Receiving Transactions, Item Catalog, and General Ledger information that flow from SPL into Oracle E-Business Suite. In addition, Purchase Orders, AP Invoices, Vendors, and Employee information flow from SPL into Oracle E-Business Suite. Leveraging Advanced Queues, business events in both systems as well as scheduled concurrent programs within Oracle E-Business Suite trigger the launch of specific BPEL processes. This prevents SPL and Oracle E-Business Suite from needing to communicate directly since they both communicate to BPEL through the shared Queue. It also establishes a central location for initiating BPEL processes, which improves manageability. To further improve the auditing capabilities of the BPEL integrations, another layer of monitoring was introduced that uses custom tables within the E-Business Suite database to track the status of various transactions. The BPEL processes update this auditing table in order to communicate details about successful or failed instances. Business owners who depend on the BPEL processes may not have access to the BPEL Console, so by storing additional information about the processes in this audit table, solutions such as custom reports and forms can be built within the Oracle E-Business Suite for these users.

Results
The decision to proceed with an enterprise system integration approach for the Water Pollution Control Facility and integrating E-Business Suite with SPL applications enabled the City to gain several efficiencies, including automation of inventory replenishment, improved costing of work orders in SPL and eliminating redundant time card entry. This initiative has also brought about increased visibility and better manageability of the interfaces with lesser staff intervention, saving the City training and support costs. BPEL is now the preferred integration tool used at the City of Las Vegas, and additional BPEL processes are currently being built to further improve the efficiency and manageability the city’s other integration points. Given its success with using Oracle Fusion Middleware for the Water Pollution Control Facility, the City has already started several other initiatives across its departments and will definitely recommend it to others.