Customer relationship management
MaMa-CRM
Customer contact handling for mass-market campaigns.
- Main goal
- Absorb a new mandator or campaign — new data structures, new file formats — without changing code.
- Business domain
- Customer relationship management
- Size
- 7–10 developers · 2–4 week iterations · ~15 months
- Strategic decisions
- Persistence generated from a UML model
- DSLs for CSV and fixed-record formats
- Rule engine for campaign process control
- Images on the filesystem, not the database
- Technologies
- Java
- Hibernate
- Oracle
- JBoss
- Drools
- ANTLR
MaMa-CRM takes the burden of (usually paper-based) customer contacts from organizations working in mass markets, like insurance, credit-card providers, mobile telecommunication providers, energy and water providers or large real-estate companies (in MaMa speak these are called «Mandator»).
It has been initially ordered by an independent mid-sized data center to support the launch of the German (government-enforced) e-Health-Card — and later on used to support campaigns like telephone billing, electrical-power metering and similar stuff.
For every mandator, there is at least one completely independent MaMa-CRM instance running, which is specifically configured for its mandator and a campaign.
MaMa-CRM architecture documentation is quite heavy in the requirements part, describing several aspects of flexibility that triggered many central architecture decisions.
The team that built the system consisted of 7-10 persons working in 2-4 week iterations for about 15 months.
Me (Gernot Starke) had the honor to be part of that team in a responsible role. The original client allowed me to talk and write about the system without disclosing the company name. I was not allowed to use any of the original documentation or source code.
Thanx to Thorsten, Sven, Arno and a few unnamed other guys for great cooperation and a successful finish.
In the full book, MaMa-CRM is completely documented. Especially the architecture decisions and solution concepts that support the enormous flexibility may be worth a read :-)