The automation of Document Collation as described above, involves message sharing between the enterprise and the business partners. Fiorano's SOA solution, illustrated in Figure 3, represents the Commitment Document Creation process where the information is collected from different business partners and is sent to a business partner for conversion of the required images into PDF formats. The modified information is aggregated and updated to a back-end database. In the implementation illustrated below, data is sent to the business partner via HTTPS calls.

1. The back-end database is polled for loan requests that are waiting for legal and property documents to be attached to them.
2. Every incoming request might not require both kinds of documents. Hence Content Based Routing ( CBR ) is used to check which documents are required for every request. It could be Legal, Property Information, or both. CBR checks the Title details and based on those routes the business document request on appropriate paths.
3. The documents, which are in the form of images, are obtained via HTTPS from different business partners based on the details of the property sale application.
4. These images are sent to a business partner via HTTP POST Adapters for "image to PDF" conversion.
5. On receipt of each image, a success code and a tracking number for the request is generated automatically and is sent back to the requesting application. This information is collated using the Aggregator Service.
6. The back-end database is updated with the latest status for the property using the DB Adapter.
7. After successful conversion, the business partner sends back the PDFs using HTTP Protocol back to the requesting application. This information is picked up using the HTTPReceive Service, which listens for HTTP Responses. HTTPReceive adapter sends an acknowledgement on receipt of the PDFs.
8. The status of the individual titles is updated in the back-end database accordingly using the DB Adapter.
9. The received information could have either one or two PDFs based on the details of the Title. The routing of the business document requests to appropriate routes is done by the Content Based Routing ( CBR ) Service so that the received information can be split into individual PDFs.
10. All the information received from the business partner is done over HTTP (i.e. the PDFs over HTTP). In addition to the PDFs, there is other information like file size, creation date, author etc. This information needs to be updated based on the format acceptable by the back-end database on par with the standards of the enterprise.
11. XSLT Transformation Services help in performing these transformations on the XML portions corresponding to each PDF.
12. An Aggregator Service is used to aggregate back the data.
13. The documents are attached to the Title. Accordingly, the back end database is updated using a Database Adapter.
14. The Database Adapter is then used to update the final status of the property sale application by setting the "Process Point".

Implementation of the Title commitment process over the Fiorano ESB™ delivers the following benefits:

• Reduced cycle times for processing of Titles.
• Ease of extension of applications. The Setting of Process point was later modified into a centralized application being used at all places where ever setting of process points were required.
• Automatic error handling strategies helped in encountering and managing network and logical errors that could occur in the flow.
• Fast data conversion using generic XSLT Transformations to avoid human errors.

Time taken to SOA Enable the Business process

As illustrated in the table below, Fiorano ESB™ solutions are rapidly implemented. This is primarily because the solutions have in-built capabilities to accommodate complex business scenarios with minimal programming efforts.

In the "title commitment" process implementation discussed above, the time taken for the different implementation activities is listed below.

Changes done after first deployment

• Setting of "process point" required some standard operations like updating a particular table, sending mail to manager, logging of the change, etc. The same was being done at many places. It was made as a separate event processes and the same was then reused everywhere, thereby simplifying the event processes.
• Centralized error handling (like logging some types of errors and sending mails for certain types) was introduced.

ROI on Fiorano ESB™ SOA Solution

As illustrated in the calculations below, the ROI percentage in the first year is 298%, rising to 814% in three years. The calculations are for a Business with revenues of $1 Billion per year, with $500 Million/year in expenses and $100 Million/year in profit. The resource costs have been taken as $150,000/person/year (base salary, benefits, overhead)

In most B2B integration scenarios, projects are traditionally developed as point-to-point applications using different technologies resulting in a tightly coupled integration environment that are

• Expensive to manage/maintain and change. Heavily dependent on database systems that required significant amount of coding and manual interventions to complete business processes
• Inflexible to addition/removal of partner companies. Any change in business process requires code changes
• Not scalable and low on performance
• Unable to provide for a business analyst view of the business process.