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Summary
This study illustrates how ECC has designed a new concept
in multi-channel customer liaison by creating a technologically
unique business communication management system for FST Technologies
Limited.
The
Company
Based in Livingston, in Scotland's 'Silicon Glen', FST is
emerging as a market leader in business-to-buyer IT, specialising
in technology-led personalisation, the art of selling in an
appropriate way to each customer, and multi-channel consumer
fulfilment, delivering the goods by the best means at the
best price.
The
Business Need and Potential
The financial, utility and service sectors in the UK and worldwide
are currently undergoing significant change towards more technology-led,
centrally controlled customer fulfilment and service options.
This allows them to reduce considerably the overheads of multiple
outlets and the inconsistently branded messages that multiple
systems generate.
A major consequence of this change, however, is that customers
now have to be handled remotely rather than through direct,
face-to-face contact. FST saw that a channel-independent communications
mechanism was the ideal way to extend its service portfolio.
Building on its many years of experience, ECC was able to
introduce this and help FST get to its markets faster and
more effectively.
The
Solution
ECC has played a key role in the development of FST's capabilities
by providing valuable resource and technical architecture
which has enabled the company to develop its technology platforms
into ground-breaking solutions. This has involved a multi-tier
process model, based on XML (Extensible Mark-up Language,
a successor to HTML). The use of XML architecture was a world
first and included XML formatted objects standards.
This model provided many advantages, including:
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Channel-independent
output |
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Multiple
branch/bank support |
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Delineation
of raw data, document content and formatting |
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Single-source
global change |
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Asynchronous
document handling |
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PDF
management and feedback |
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Multi-language
(19-language output from single source) |
Above all else the flexibility of the solution allowed the
end customer to make changes almost instantaneously and with
minimum fuss.
The
Technology
The only way ECC could deliver a high-volume, flexible solution
which would meet the requirements of the customer was to adopt
XML standards.
In this the case extraction engine builds, from a specific
set of Java classes, a case- (or customer-) specific XML document.
The main reasons for initiating this XML document build are:
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To
distance the data from the database as early as possible,
thus facilitating use of advanced data manipulation tools
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To
remove the need to build entire software classes to extract
document-specific data |
The process of building such a document is fuelled by an XSLT
script, which manipulates the source XML document(s) into
a single XML output document, underpinned by raw source data
and document-specific content rules. The DTD (document type
definition) of this output document is a simple one which
covers the primitive elements that define a conceptual document.
Very importantly, this simple DTD ensures that all documents,
irrespective of content or medium, conform to the same structure.
The Value and Benefit
FST required a rapid, flexible, highly efficient system that
would keep down costs and make their services more profitable.
Within a very tight timeframe, ECC has also generated and
continues to mastermind a solution which has improved management
information systems, increased the value to the end user and
extended business services to other clients with a minimum
of redevelopment.
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