You don't usually equate rapid growth with maintaining intimate customer relationships. But that balance is just what electronics manufacturer Flextronics has achieved by leveraging its service-oriented architecture. Flextronics provides design, engineering, manufacturing, and logistics services to electronics device companies, with services tailored to individual customers in a range of industries, from automotive to medical to wireless.

To do that, Flextronics must be able to tightly integrate with its customers' supply chains and closely align with their manufacturing processes. Recently, it used an 18-month SOA integration project to improve in both areas.

Many companies look to SOA as a way of rearchitecting their IT infrastructures to eliminate redundancy and accelerate project delivery via consolidation and reuse of services. SOA lets them leverage existing assets rather than having to create redundant silos for each business need. This, in turn, makes IT more efficient, allowing for shorter cycle times and quicker project delivery. For Flextronics, this had the potential to dramatically increase its OEM customers' loyalty by reducing their costs and helping them more effectively monitor and optimize customer service metrics.

At least, that was the promise. The truth is that SOA projects have a reputation for introducing unwanted complexity and not living up to the expectations of businesses, IT departments, and customers.

Flextronics' SOA project qualifies as a success: It improved operational efficiency and accelerated supply chain turnaround for its customers, plus the company reaped an additional benefit from its SOA effort. Its October 2007 $3.6 billion acquisition of Solectron, which also provides electronics manufacturing services to OEMs, promised to transform that industry. Combining the two global companies involved adding more than 24,000 e-mail users, 60 locations, and more than 60 systems that support more than 100 midsize and large sites in 30 countries across four continents. The integration effort could easily have compromised customer service, but Flextronics did it in four months without missing a beat when it came to engineering the complex electronic devices it manufactures and services for its customers. Its success was in part due to the lessons the company learned from the SOA integration project it was in the process of completing.

ALL-IN-ONE B-TO-B
Flextronics' IT department launched the SOA project two years ago as a way to merge all its business-to-business offerings—including a number of legacy applications—into a single SOA gateway, says Arun Rao, director of business-to-business architecture and applications. Rao was responsible for the initial SOA design and managed the team that implemented it.

The company had purchased a WebMethods Enterprise Service Bus and was adapting it to its own environment when the Solectron acquisition was announced. "It seemed like the right time to modulate our plans to include the new environment," Rao says. Flextronics opted for a slow and steady ESB rollout—a SOA best practice, Rao says. "Our IT department picked small projects, and we saw the lessons learned from each before we implemented a bigger one."

When integrating with a new customer's systems, the SOA approach lets Flextronics create generic objects within WebMethods that can be pieced together 40% faster than before, Rao says. Customization of these objects, when necessary, is only done at the component level, reducing the overall testing time and shortening the time needed to add new customers, he adds.