Chapter 4. Extended Enterprise pattern 73
will improve organizational efficiency and reduce the latency of business events
by integrating the external resellers with the inventory replenishment system and
reducing the likelihood of unfilled orders. The Extended Enterprise pattern also
applies a structured exchange with business partners and supports real-time
access to and from applications. This will allow the resellers to receive the
benefits of an updated inventory and receive real-time response of any out of
stock items.
The Extended Enterprise pattern also allows this company to minimize
application complexity and to integrate their applications with resellers that have
unique infrastructure designs. They will be able to leverage their current skills
and legacy investments, eliminating the need for extensive retraining and
infrastructure investments.
4.2.3 Solution
The Extended Enterprise pattern might consist of all or some of the following
elements:
? Business entities that typically consist of programs, applications, or
databases that exist within an organization that need to access and connect
to other business entities across the network.
? A network that:
– Is based on TCP/IP and other Internet technologies
– Can be a dedicated Wide Area Network (WAN) connection
? Business rules that:
– Manage the integration between the business entities
– Describe trading partner agreements
– Use workflow rules to determine the sequence of steps and the data flow
that needs to be used to facilitate the integration. These rules:
• Describe the sequence of steps that a message needs to go through
before being transferred to the other business entity
• Specify how and where the message should be delivered
– Use transformation rules to specify format and protocol transformations
that need to be applied to messages that flow between the business
entities
? A set of interactions that includes the execution of a jointly-agreed business
process
? Patterns based on those described by the business interaction patterns
framework.