Based in Schaumburg, Illinois, Regular Baptist Press is the publishing arm of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC). The organization publishes Sunday School curriculum and a wide array of religiously themed books, including titles on Bible studies, Christian living, and church administration. The organization also publishes a variety of classroom and home study textbooks.

David Bosket is Regular Baptist Press's director of technology. Bosket is looking to Web services to provide the automatic integration of product, customer, and inventory information. He notes that Regular Baptist Press entered into Web services when it began revamping its direct sales Web site.

About 15 percent to 20 percent of our business is done through the Web. Previously, we had a CGI-, Perl-based environment that had very limited functionality. We had to hard-code everything. If this month we entered a customer's credit card number, shipping address, and billing address, and the customer returned with another order the next month, we would have to repeat exactly the same process. It was a huge inconvenience for our customers and internal support staff. So, we decided to take a look at developing a more comprehensive Web site—one that could retain customer information and instantly recognize customers whenever they come back.

Bosket's first step in creating such a system was to utilize S3-CISPUB, a publishing industry-oriented ERP product.

We acquired S3-CISPUB, which has an e-commerce interface that imports records and text-based files, which got my mind going. I thought, if it can be done manually, why couldn't the process also be accomplished automatically?

Bosket's next step was to find a Web-based technology that would tie product, customer, and inventory information into one neat package. While attending an S3-CISPUB user group conference, Bosket met Mary Westheimer, founder and chairman of BookZone, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company that designs e-commerce Web sites for book publishers. Bosket says BookZone offered technology that appeared to closely match his need for automatic data integration.

We started talking about what it would take to develop a Web site that was fully integrated and could automatically and directly dump records from our Web store right into an order-entry system and vice versa. Such a system, rather than requiring manual inputs or imports, would just automatically supply the data wherever it was needed. It would also allow discount structures to be put in place and provide customer recognition capabilities and several other sophisticated operations.

The Web environment that Bosket, Westheimer, and S3-CISPUB cocreated consists of four main components. The primary Web store functionalities are provided by BookZone; however, the product and customer content management is supported and maintained by S3:

CISPUB—The Regular Baptist Press's ERP system. The system includes:

The centralized data components, such as product information, customer accounts, and tracking information, are entered, maintained, and updated within CISPUB.

A text file is passed to BookZone twice daily with these records updated to provide current and relevant information to our Regular Baptist Press customers.

All credit card processing will be accomplished on CISPUB to help maintain consistency in record keeping.

BZGenesis—The Regular Baptist Press's Web site. The site includes:

A database-generated catalog.

A search engine.

A shopping cart and other e-commerce capabilities.

Secure ordering.

An FTP gateway.

E-mail capabilities.

BZHarmony—The middleware that lies between S3-CISPUB and BZGenesis. It includes:

Support for Web site order entries.

A secure FTP gateway for information exchange.

Fully automated product database system integration. (The software updates the Web site's product database with S3-CISPUB's current product database on a scheduled basis.)

An integrated product inventory that displays the current quantity of products available and the status of products that are currently unavailable.

Customer information support, including the autopopulation of fields in the shopping cart system and order tracking.

BZHub—BookZone's hosting service, which uses a Windows 2000 server platform and point-to-point T1 access.

The environment's BZHarmony middleware contains the core Web services components. BZHarmony was developed with ColdFusion, a Macromedia product. Compatible with J2EE application servers, ColdFusion is designed to allow Web application developers to utilize a Java-oriented Web services strategy.

Westheimer says it was important for the Regular Baptist Press to have a middleware product that could allow a seamless and flawless exchange of information, utilizing XML and other Web services technologies.

BZHarmony's bidirectional implementation is a bit like a post office drop. We take information gathered at the Web site, drop it to a database, and then transfer it to CISPUB, where the information is imported and verified.

The overall Web site brings a high degree of integration to Regular Baptist Press's Web site and back-end operations, says Westheimer.

Among the functions are order status, order history, order tracking, inventory updates, and product updates. It's all bidirectional, so any changes made in the business system are transferred to the site. That reduces errors and increases correlation and accuracy.

Westheimer believes that Web services are becoming a cost-effective tool. She notes that the technology is rapidly replacing custom-built and proprietary information exchange technologies.

It's really a sound vision, because of the cost-effectiveness and the fact that we're now able to feed through all sorts of different information. Extensible Markup Language has been a big part of that, replacing technologies that people in our industry have been paying a considerable amount of money for. The Web enables us to increase the speed and lower costs, and that's very important.

Westheimer feels that Web services are ushering in a new era of Web-centric businesses.

The concept is to utilize the Web as the center of an organization's IT operations. I have been gratified to find that, when I offer this message to the publishing industry, I get a great response. Five years ago, they would have rolled their eyes politely, because the vision hadn't yet been widely accepted and also because the technology wasn't where it is now.

The Web was, for a long time, a big question mark. There was a tendency to set up operations separately. In other words, we have a Web site over here and business intelligence and CRM systems over there; we have our business system over here and our warehouse management operations system over there. That's where Web services come in; they get all the operations to mesh together.

By providing robust integration functions, Web services have the potential to eliminate repetitive, time-wasting activities, says Westheimer.

In the past, organizations would find themselves inputting the same data in three or four different places. That's a waste of resources, of course. So the Regular Baptist Press's project shows real foresight. Bosket's ideas, meshed with BookZone's and S3's technology, allows information to be entered just once, and then shared throughout the system.

Westheimer notes that Web services provide a substantial improvement in resource management, although many enterprises are unaware of this, or simply fail to recognize this fact.

I give the Regular Baptist Press a lot of credit for seeing this fact so clearly and embracing it. I think a lot of this vision has to do with David Bosket himself and his ability to see the big picture clearly. It's very impressive.

Bosket says he tapped BookZone because of his own limited development resources.

My IT team consists of only two people: an application developer and a system administrator. I only have one programmer, who also has other responsibilities. Utilizing my application developer to tie everything together and to accomplish everything inhouse would have been unacceptably costly, and it would have taken a very long time. I didn't want to tie up my resources. Going to BookZone was much more cost-efficient than trying to do it ourselves.

Bosket says he was never very concerned about being an early Web services adopter.

I've never been concerned about that. To me, the technology is mature enough that it's not an issue. Everything may not run right away, but that's to be expected with any new deployment. I really feel that Web services' maturity, at least as far as database integrations go, is mature enough.

While Web services are often associated with cutting-edge, start-up businesses, Bosket notes that the technology is also critical to established enterprises.

We're a traditional business that's been in operation for over fifty years. Yet we need to keep up with the market and new marketing channels, such as the Web. We would go out of business if we looked at things from a traditional perspective. We must keep in tune with our customers and have the correct feel for meeting their needs.

It is the marrying of the technology to tradition that I see going on right now. People are no longer trying to create bubbles of utopia and wonderment; they're trying to conduct a business. We need to tie technology into our traditional business model. I need to have cost factors and ROIs, just as in a traditional business model.

We are currently in the testing phase of this project. We have had a number of issues come up, such as data manipulation and scrubbing, and normal testing glitches. However, each issue that has arisen has been dealt with, with a systematic and methodical approach, and eventually taken care of.

So far, the deployment has gone rather smoothly, says Bosket.

As far as obstacles go, I haven't had any major problems. I'm anticipating a few, minor glitches during this first year of operation, but I'm not really anticipating any huge problems. Maybe I'm looking at things through my rose-colored glasses, but I'm not anticipating anything big.

Despite the overwhelming hype surrounding Web services, Bosket says he tries to take a pragmatic view of the technology's capabilities.

I want to use Web services to enhance our organization's ability to perform sound business functions. That's really what the technology is there for. Something like Web services is not meant to do everything—it's not designed to replace people, for example. The technology is simply there to help your business processes perform in a better way.

Bosket notes that it's important to keep open to new ideas and to maintain clear and open communication channels.

Communication is very important. You have to know your business, and you have to be willing to communicate with your people to know what's going to work and what's not going to work. There must be support from the top down. You need to know what the workers in the trenches are doing.

One also needs to have a solid understanding of technical and business processes. If you sit back and think, "Well, it should work this way,'' and you don't really know for sure, you're going to get burned. We've been hit a couple of times—in minor ways—by that kind of mind-set. Sometimes, you just don't know how processes and technologies will work. Guessing at things isn't a good approach to follow. Nothing beats practical knowledge.

An IT manager developing a Web services project also needs to be able to distribute responsibility. It's important to involve both internal employees and external consultants in key project aspects, says Bosket.

One of the things we struggled with a little bit was delegating responsibility. In other words, exactly who is responsible for a particular area? A couple times, when dealing with BookZone, I felt like telling their people, "You know your system, tell me what I need to put in there.'' Their response would be, "But this is dealing with your business process, so you tell us what you want it to be.'' There was this nebulous gray area between us. At times, it really did feel like "us'' versus "them.''

BookZone's Westheimer says team meetings, held during the development process, allowed Regular Baptist Press's managers to air concerns and set responsibilities.

We got everybody on a conference call; all the people who would be involved with the site's functions—marketing, business management, and IT. Everybody talked things through in terms of what they would like to have, what was important to them, and what they never wanted to have happen to them.

Having such a meeting is powerful, because it allowed us to get information from the departments that are on the front lines. These people experience things, see things, and know things that management may not be aware of, and probably shouldn't be, because they have other concerns. These are the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts details that only the people in the trenches know. One gets a much better design result from their input.

From a management standpoint, this sort of session provides a really good buy-in. Otherwise, the managers are simply having something done to them. By airing their views and listening to the various reactions, they're participants. They're on the team. The approach allows them to understand what's being done and why it's happening. They're now a part of the process, and they have an investment in getting everything working and going forward.

Bosket says the cooperation between Regular Baptist Press managers and BookZone and S3 representatives benefited all organizations.

Ultimately, we worked through things and we were able to get what we needed.

With a rapidly changing technology, like Web services, it's important to have the ability to learn quickly, says Bosket.

I'm discovering all this stuff by trial and fire. It took a lot of time to learn all the processes and to be able to communicate with people.

The learning process is very important. When we went into this project, five of our top people had been in their jobs for less than a year. We all had to make a major conversion. Thankfully, we were blessed that everything has fallen into place. We've learned a lot. We all hung in there.