Variant A: Human Workflow

The scene is complelty performed without technical infrastructure. The only means needed for collaboration between Francesa, Giorgio and Antonia is an internal file-share that is used to store the results of the daily actions as PDF and the summarizing Powerpoint slide deck.

CloudSocket Intervention: None, potentially basic file sharing services to be used.

Variant B: On-demand Research

Variant B builds upon the initial variant, where the research process is executed independent of actual demands for equipment (quantities and quality), this variant includes and integration with the inventory management and project execution environment. A notification in the form of a ticket triggers Francesca and Giorgio to start their lookup. Due to their experience, they know exactly where to search things and are efficient in doing so, nevertheless it is impossible for anyone else to follow up on their research expertise. Tracking of analysis results and their comparison is difficult.

Introducing a cloud-based ticketing system, team-lead Antonia starts to externalize on the research activities and resources on instance level, not replacing but documenting the human search task more efficiently. Additionally, the current base infrastructure of local file shares becomes more accessible in a daily basis, independent of the device used.

CloudSocket Intervention:

• On-demand notification in case of demand from inventory system
• Ticketing system (like JIRA or OSTicket) to track the progress of research runs, must grows with the organisation.
• Support "out-sourcing" of research tasks to "idle" personnel
• Access analysis results from anywhere

Variant C: Supported Search - Recommended Link Directory

Building upon variant B, the research process is enhanced by a directory of recommended links that are used frequently. Through tagging and annotation of the directory entries, Francesca and Giorgio quickly search for important and notworthy links to find good information on the internet.

CloudSocket Intervention:

• A service is needed that enables the maintenance of a link list and semantically describe those links
• The services of variant B are loosly combined with the link repository, supporting any kind of maintenance task and enable flexiblility.

Variant D: "Nightly-Search Analysis" Builds

Since the subprocess of "search and retrieve" task performed by both procurement experts is comparable, this part is out-sourced to an automation engine. The recommended links repository is used an input, filtered by the annotations for equipment and a nightly crawl/search for all possible combination is performed and stored accordingly. The input of a pre-analysis is supported by the system so that Francesca and Giorgio have a look at this initial report first thing in the morning to brief Antonia on current market trends. The match-making of analysis results to actual needs is done by all three team members.

CloudSocket Intervention:

• Automation mechanisms to enable time-triggered and on-demand crawls
• Reasoning based on inventory lists to identify all potential needs
• Analysis dashboard for search results