Title: Designing systems using business components: a case study in call centre automation

Authors: Parviz Ghandforoush, Tarun K. Sen, David P. Tegarden, Ramachandran Ramaswamy

Addresses: Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, 22043, USA. ' Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, 22043, USA. ' Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA, 22043, USA. ' Yahoo! Inc., 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, USA

Abstract: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have some inherent disadvantages as businesses become more complex and competition more intense. The mismatch between business processes that an organisation desires and the business process provided by ERP systems can be unproductive and dysfunctional due to the inherent lack of flexibility offered by ERP systems. Business components-based design provides the flexibility to enhance better matches between |real| business processes and |systems| embedded business processes. Although business component-based design affords more flexibility, there exist significant implementation challenges including the lack of availability of business components in the market. Traditional business components-based design use object oriented design techniques that use a bottom-up approach. In this research, we use a business process driven design approach using business components for customer relationship management (CRM) systems, a type of enterprise system. Using a case study, we demonstrate the benefits and challenges of using a business components-based design methodology to build CRM systems and apply it to the development of call centre automation (CCA) software.

Keywords: business components; component-based design; embedded business processes; enterprise systems design; enterprise resource planning; call centres; automation software; dysfunctional systems; flexibility; match enhancement; implementation challenges; component availability; USA; United States; object oriented design; customer relationship management; e-CRM; electronic CRM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECRM.2010.031863

International Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 2010 Vol.4 No.2, pp.161 - 179

Published online: 26 Feb 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article