Bpost - Dispatch Complaint System

September 2006 - December 2006
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Management Summary

The purpose of the project was a green field rapid development of a management system and content-based router system for handling complaints made by customers of Bpost. The application captures the complaints entered through web forms, which are then distributed to the proper divisions to take care of them. The business case for this project was IT rationalization, as it replaced several applicative components with one new application.

Team Composition

IT Sponsor: Dirk Dussart
Project Manager/Architect: Peter De Kinder
Developer: Bert Walschap

Lessons Learned

The Spring custom developed application acts as a Content Based Router. In order to render it as flexible as possible the different channels to which it is to rout, can be linked through configuration within a web application based on thresholds and certain fields within the entered complaint. These configurations are stored in xml structures, editable at runtime without the need for a restart of the application.

Content Based Routing is a standard Enterprise Integration Pattern, as described in the book “Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions” by Hohpe and Woolf. The pattern is described as follows:

The Content-Based Router examines the message content and routes the message onto a different channel based on data contained in the message. The routing can be based on a number of criteria such as existence of fields, specific field values etc. When implementing a Content-Based Router, special caution should be taken to make the routing function easy to maintain as the router can become a point of frequent maintenance. In more sophisticated integration scenarios, the Content-Based Router can take on the form of a configurable rules engine that computes the destination channel based on a set of configurable rules.

Project Silo Architecture Public Sector