InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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October 16, 2000 |
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XML schemas
XML Conversion: Vital To A Freight Company's Success
Freightdesk.com's xml apps use client-specific business rules to manage data dependencies
By James E. Gaskin
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e're not in the business of making our customers use the Extensible Markup Language," says Kevin Gavin, senior VP of product development at FreightDesk.com, a provider of online cargo-management applications for international freight. "We just want the data to make the system work."Gavin, who has years of experience in the worldwide freight business, knows that critical data comes from a range of systems. FreightDesk.com's software must collect, clean, process, and return data to customers with systems ranging from standalone DOS PCs, 20-year-old AS/400s, and high-tech data centers newer than his own.
FreightDesk.com manages the complicated shipping supply chain of shippers, forwarders, carriers, financial parties, and warehouses. Its primary market--freight forwarders--specializes in handling freight coming into or leaving particular countries or regions.
Three of FreightDesk.com's products provide support to the shipping supply chain, and a fourth is on the way. FreightDesk.Pro, the company's most popular offering, works on an application service provider model hosted by FreightDesk.com. FreightDesk.Office takes the next step: It reads and writes information directly onto the client's back-office system. And Tracking.com places shipping information on the company's Web site for clients to review.
"We love XML," Gavin says. "We wish there was nothing else." Gavin's life won't be that simple for years, if ever. FreightDesk.com receives data in a variety of forms, ranging from type-delimited flat files to spreadsheets to electronic data interchange forms to clean XML.
Every data item that FreightDesk .com receives gets converted to XML for use internally and to populate its SQL database tables. Every data item sent out by FreightDesk.com goes as XML files directly or is translated into a data dialect usable on the receiving end.
If you thought filling out Federal Express and UPS forms was a pain, imagine dealing with dozens of freight forms in a variety of languages, including government forms. That's why most international freight is outsourced to freight forwarders. These intermediaries handle the logistics, paperwork, and arcane transportation rules specific to their parts of the world.
FreightDesk.com has eight developers, who are managed by Gavin. Their XML development tool of choice? Text editors.
"We could save a lot of time with shortcuts if we just assumed the data from our customers was good," Gavin says. "But we don't do that. No matter how high-end their systems are, or how technical they are, we don't ever trust the data."
Once the customer's data has been verified as clean and usable and is loaded into the production database, XML takes over. No matter in which form the data arrives, an internal transformation turns data into XML files. "All our data-conversion applications on the inbound side are written by us," Gavin says. "Because we need to make sure the data is clean and rational before we apply it to the database, we feel more comfortable writing the code ourselves."
Orphan records in a relational database cause trouble. Missing data and data items in the wrong place in a file will corrupt the Microsoft SQL Server database functioning as the core of FreightDesk.com.
Custom data-extraction parser software, written in-house, usually in C or C++, awaits input from particular customers. Files come into FreightDesk.com holding new data in a known format. Software parsers look through the file and arrange the data elements to match the SQL data table. Each SQL table entry must have appropriate data, so items are rearranged into the correct order.
Sometimes, FreightDesk.com programmers generate fields not supplied in the original data file to allow data to fit properly into the relational data model. XML files, created during the transformation of incoming data, go into the SQL database. Output from the database once again uses XML files, which are used to reformat data to match the client's receiving system.
FreightDesk.com creates business rules for every client to match incoming data with the relational database for internal use and the resulting output. Microsoft's Visio diagramming program for Windows charts the business rules used by the XML programs to filter and rearrange the data. Visio also gets utilized to chart various database relationships.
The SQL databases coordinate the data transformation process, driven by Gavin's data concerns. "There are quicker ways to integrate data, but we don't trust the data we get. Bad data ruins the entire process," he says.
"After we have clean data, we use XML to extract data pulled from incoming files. The data is then organized into proper XML files that generate shipping orders and everything else," Gavin says. Customers with Microsoft SQL or Oracle can accept properly formatted XML output files easily, but they're a rarity in the freight-forwarding business.
Many freight forwarders use at least some level of EDI, for example. FreightDesk.com will initiate a transaction sequence when it receives an EDI 850, a purchase order, or an EDI 856, a purchase-order update.
All this data runs against a simulated, not production, database. Once the incoming data passes the test with the simulated database, Gavin's production systems get the data and the information becomes available through the Tracking.com Web interface.
"There's a practical challenge in translating EDI into XML," Gavin says. "Our domain expertise here is a huge competitive advantage for us."
The SQL server portion of his system is critical to Gavin. "SQL servers will become a commodity," he says. "But we'll always stick with Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle." SQL Server powers the process, but Unix systems running Oracle software intrigue Gavin because of their horsepower and stability.
"We're the only player focusing on the freight forwarder," says Rob Quartel, FreightDesk.com's CEO. "One forwarder services between 100 and 500 shippers." Freight, especially non-domestic deliveries, may be the most outsourced business service. Companies rely on a network of different freight forwarders around the world, and successful forwarders support hundreds of client companies. But that also means the freight forwarders call the shots in the relationship, since FreightDesk.com functions as an ASP and data integration service for them.
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