E-Business Design in Colibri Tours - Case Study Example

Introduction E-business applications would be using retail sales and supply chain integration and there has to be a tailored architecture that would be controlling the decision making process. The extent to which e-business is likely to transform a market would be depending on the nature of the product or the service that has been identified as being sold or being bought. There have been retail services that has been delivering the goods and services electronically. The e-business model would be transforming the Internet technology using the online service and there has been no need for the persons anywhere in the world to go to bank directly to open an account and that would mean customers could be starting an account online and the process would be completed automatically. There has been new front-end applications that would be verifying the web applications online and starting the relation with the bank. The front-end applications and the backend applications of the bank would be extending a wide range of services to the customer. There would be a workflow technology that would be helping the bank to improve the customer service. The reason for using information technology more in the services could be attributed to the fact that information has been considered as an asset and the basis for writing the report would be that e-business process would be in four steps and that could be said as external and internal environment, selecting the e-business, implementing the e-business and there would be evaluating the success of the e-business strategy. Colibri Tours had chosen to develop a website in order to reach clients directly rather than through intermediaries. The travel agency was able to improve the speed and quality of its services, reduce its promotional costs and lock in customers. There was another web site that could be termed as RECF, a French-Canadian group of editors, who had increased the sales by getting publications online. The companies would be looking at the targeted client base and geographic markets for new or traditional products, companies would plan the implementation of the e-business and decide what all technologies has to be implemented. The financial indicators for the Colibri tours could be said as follows and that would mean lower average cost per subscription, increased revenue per subscription, higher number of subscriptions and payback period for technological investments. The internal process indicators would be said as follows and that could be number of service denials that the server would be having, performance of search tools used in the web site, the quality of articles that has been used in the web site, the variety of download formats that has been seen in the link format, the ease of maintaining Web site, the average time to give feedback, the decreased workload for managing and handling subscriptions and the download speed of the web site would be checked. There would be customer feedback that would be used for understanding the web site and that would mean that number of queries per user would be tracked along with other information like number of downloads per user or the search engine used and the number of complaints has been received and that has been solved. There would be a number of site updates that has to be tracked and there has to increased web site functionalities that have to be compared with compared with competitors and the average age of technology infrastructure has to be an important factor in determining the organization success. The business process of ColibriTours The web site has been constructed in a design that has not been flashy and the web site has been easy to upload. (Collibri tours) There has been links at the bottom and clicking at the links would be taking the web site to the concerned pages. There has been a travel request form that has been the most important thing in the web site and that has been kept at the bottom. The fault in the design could be termed as the web site has been more content oriented and the user may not be feeling a way to get attached to the web site and that would mean there has to be change in the forms and that is where the changes has to be happening. Customers would be accessing the web site using their browser or other browser based interfaces via the Internet. The customer would be entering the web site and placing an order using the travel request form. The customer’s Web service could retrieve and update information from the Customer Database that would be connected to the system. There have been many questions that have been asked and the questions could be termed as more of open-ended questions and these have to be stored in the database. COLIBRI TOURS LTD has been established in 1988 and from the start was committed to give a personalized service to its clientele, whether individual or groups. As the company was getting better known, COLIBRI TOURS reached to conquer the European market, offering a variety of itineraries to satisfy the most discriminating traveler. Collibri tours) COLIBRI TOURS is a year around operation offering programs adapted to the seasons. Some of our services offered: (Collibri tours) Meet & Greet at the airport (Collibri tours), Groups, Fly & Drive, F.I.T., Incentive and high end (Collibri tours), customized itineraries to suit the client (Collibri tours), outdoor activities and soft adventures (Collibri tours) and Multilingual guides (Collibri tours ) Service Oriented Architecture Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) could be said as an IT architectural style that would be supporting the transformation of web based business to a set of linked services, or business tasks that are getting repeated and that could be accessed over the network. (IBM Web Services Architecture Team.) The service provider would be creating a web service with service definition and there has to be standard called universal description, discovery and integration and the service would be published to the service registry and there could be finding of service through a service registry. The publishing of web service would mean that the service requester would be finding the service through a process called the UDDI interface and the registry of the UDDI would be providing the service requester with a WSDl service and Uniform resource locators job would be to pint to the service itself. The information that would be used would be bind at the service and invoking it. Web Service Descriptions Introduction to WS and WSDL There has been increased use of e-commerce applications in the world and a single business transaction would be using a number of web-based services and they would be providing conceptual foundation and a technology infrastructure for service-oriented computing. That would be helping the software program that has been written in different languages on various platforms to get into communication mode in the Web services that could be best considered as reusable software components over the Internet. There has been new web based services that has been added and linked to the existing web service. The one method that has been used to describe the web based service has been the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), that is normally a document written in XML and would be specifying the location of the service. 1. Types: Defines the data types used by messages 2. Message: Defines the data passed from one point to another in a call 3. Port Type: There would be a collection of operations and normally the name of the operation would be the name of the method that has been being called. Operation: There would be a combination of input, output and fault messages Defines a combination of input, output, and fault messages Input: The message that has been send to the server Output: The message that the client gets Introduction to WS and WSDL In the last few decades, there is a growing trend that various commercial and other organizations provide their services through the web in e‐commerce environment. A single business transaction therefore invokes a number of web services. Web services provide a conceptual foundation and a technology infrastructure for service oriented computing [IBM Web Services Architecture Tam. (2000). Web services architecture overview. The next stage of evolution for business, IBM Technical Document, Web Architecture Library]. It allows program written in different languages on different platforms to communicate with each other in standard‐based way. Web services are considered as reusable software components over the Internet. New web services are continuously being added and linked to existing web services. It is essential to model web services and analyzes how they work in such a dynamic distributed environment. WS and WSDL in Collibri.com This has been a major travel based e-commerce companies to sell service over the Internet, and the travel based web site has been offering a wide range of services to customers. The system used in the web site could be said as not 100 % fool proof and that means there has to be improvement in the process of e-business. Order Service The order service that has been used in the web site has been more open ended and the intention has been to drive the sales of the web site and as a self‐standing service, it can be modeled with two operations: One for validating the products that were selected, and a second one to purchase selected products. The following Web Service Description Language (WSDL) depicts the fundamental aspects of AOS. Critical Discussions To develop and test web services for our e‐business case, database needs to be created at first, and that should be used for storing, retrieving and updating data for both server side and client side. There has to be a proper platform that has to be chosen and that has to be set up for building and invoking web services. The database has been created by using the Oracle and consists of few tables, such as customer table, order table, book table, category table, and so on Conclusion The e-commerce has been growing and there has been increased use of people to the web based services and not only books but also everything under the sun has been sold through the Internet. Internet digital sales have been on the rise and that has been affecting the sales over the counter. There has been increased use of travel sales that has been happening over the counter and that has to be increased using the latest technologies in web based media. References IBM Web Services Architecture Team. (2000). Web services architecture overview. The next stage of evolution for ebusiness, IBM Technical Document, Web ArchitectureLibrary Milanovic, N. and M. Malek (2004). "Current solutions for Web service composition." Internet Computing, IEEE 8(6): 51‐59. Collibri tours,viewed from http://www.colibritours.com/form.html on October 19,2009. Read More