Scribe Software Blog

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 3. Transferability

Last time I discussed the need for flexibility when designing and implementing integration solutions. In this installment, I cover the third capability essential to a collaborative integration platform, Transferability.

In many cases, the people responsible for designing and implementing the integration processes are not the same people who will be administering them once they are put into production. Integration design and development is generally performed by business and/or data analysts who gather business requirements, create a design that meets those requirements, and develop the integration itself. The design of the integration could include defining the events that initiate an integration process, capturing, filtering and/or merging the relevant data affected by the events, mapping and transforming that data, establishing rules for data ownership, and designing error capture and remediation. The implementation itself involves completing the unit and system testing to ensure that the integration processes are ready for production. The final task of the integration developer is ensuring the integration is working in production and transitioning the ongoing ownership.

This hand off of the solution is very critical to the success of the integration project. How do you transfer ownership of the solution to someone that does not have intimate knowledge of the detailed design? Are there tools and dashboards that exist that can enable this person to know when things are working well and when they are not? Is there a straightforward mechanism in place for them to repair data issues? It is easy to identify which issues they can resolve or which issues they should contact the integration developer? If the original integration developer is no longer available, can someone else with integration design skills quickly understand the integration design and make modifications or enhancements to it?

This issue of transferability is also critical to the partner. It is very costly for a partner to pull their integration designers off other their other customer projects and have them fix an issue at an existing deployment. Depending on the issue, having to go back and fix or constantly maintain the integration can negatively impact the customer and partner relationship. A good partner makes sure their customer understands the integration software, the design of their particular integrations, and that the customer can maintain it.

Next up…Supportability.

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 2. Flexibility

This is the next installment of the posts I started in April about the key capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. It has been over a month since I blogged about the first in the series about Reusability. Things got a bit away from me over the last five weeks but I hope to pick up the pace. So here it goes. The second big capability is Flexibility.

Flexibility

Integration requires a flexible approach. There are infinite varieties of integration needs as there are customers and business systems. One key driver of this variability is industry. The integration processes across different vertical markets can be dramatically different. Take for example, the integration of an order process between CRM and ERP in a distribution company versus a capital goods manufacturer. The integration for the distribution company is going to very transaction intensive with paramount emphasis on ensuring that the sales and services teams have up to date information on the location and delivery schedules of goods, while the capital goods manufacturer will likely focus on leveraging back office data about their customers to up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services. Integration processes can also vary greatly within industries based on differences in business models from company to company. A simple example is the difference between a direct selling and a channel selling organization.

Typical areas of variability in integration design include:

• The data design of each business application involved and the transformations needed to resolve the design differences between those business applications,
• The rules of data ownership: which system is the master of what data; which systems can insert or update certain records or fields; etc.,
• The actions that trigger integration events and the rules to process those integrations.

Beware of pre-packaged integration solutions, particularly around this issue of flexibility. They may seem a lot easier to implement, but may not give the user close to what their business requires. Even if a customer can take advantage of a pre-packaged integration solution, the solution will almost always require modification to address the customer's needs. These changes can range from minimal to extensive depending on how unique the business requirements are.

Custom code to achieve integration has a major advantage where it offers unlimited flexibility to meet a customer's needs. There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that one has the resources with the skills and time necessary. The downside is cost in people, time, and money including the initial cost of the implementing the integration project and the ongoing costs of supporting and modifying the integration over time. The cost of custom code is always more expensive and can be out of reach for some customers. For many customers, the right answer is a third party integration tool that combines a graphical user interface, templates for common integration scenarios, and significant depth of configuration capabilities. An integration tool gives customers to the ability get exactly what they need while significantly reducing (or in some cases, eliminating) the costs and complexity of a custom coded integration.

Next up…Transferability.

 

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 1. Reusability

In my previous post I introduced the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform. Now I'll get into the good stuff and begin with capability #1, Reusability.

Reusability

Partners invest heavily in developing the depth and expertise around the unique business requirements of their specific industry focus to provide solutions that deliver competitive advantage for their clients. A key question for any partner is how to take advantage of this industry knowledge and business process and distribute that quickly and easily to a broader set of clients without having to "reinvent the wheel" at every client site. A packaged solution offered by a partner benefits the customer by offering a lower cost and lower risk integration option, as the they gain the benefit of the partner's expertise not only in the industry but also with the integration needs typical of customers in that industry. Customers may do an integration project once or not at all; the partner brings their experience and insight from many integration projects.

This sounds all well and good, but is not so easy to implement in practice. Invariably things get in the way. First, the project teams at partners are generally under a lot of pressure to complete their project and then move on to the next customer. They do not have the time to package the solution into something that can be re-used. Even if they did have the time, not all of the elements of a customer's specific solution are transferable to another customer. There are a number of elements that are very specific to the particular deployment. There may also be unique intellectual property within the solution that the partner may want to protect. The solution may also be implemented by an individual lacking the same depth of skills as the original designer of the solution and so, requires a more streamlined deployment experience. All of these things stand in the way of achieving the great benefits of reusability.

A collaborative integration approach:

• Provides partners the ability to repackage an integration solution in a simple and easy manner. It should not add significant incremental effort to any project.
• Makes it easy to pick and choose the common elements of a solution implementation that can be packaged and re-used.
• Protects the partner's intellectual property. A partner may invest significant effort to develop unique and innovative methods or approaches to solving particular industry or application integration challenges. Without some way to protect this intellectual property, partners may be reluctant to package the integration and spend the time re-implementing the integration at each client site which increases cost and time for both the partner and customer.
• Allows customization which may be something as simple as a wizard based UI where configuration choices are driven by metadata provided by the user to the use of a full suite of integration design tools depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the integration needed.

That is all for now. Next up…Flexibility.

Introducing the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform

In my previous blog post, I spoke of the changing role of the partner brought on by the advent of cloud computing. In this new world, partners are moving away from a reliance on 'systems integration' and moving towards creating value-added industry focused solutions. A critical component to these solutions is the need to help companies make sense of the integration requirements to other business applications and data sources. When developing an integration approach, it is important to recognize the different and evolving roles between the partner and customer throughout the phases of an application deployment. Even if there isn't a partner involved, in many cases IT organizations act in a similar capacity as partner to the business to deliver a successful CRM project. A collaborative approach to integration between "partner" and "customer" best serves the integration needs of companies deploying these business applications.

It is rare that one person has all of the skills and knowledge necessary to fully implement an integration solution. In a CRM integration project for example, the development of the integration requires a solid understanding of the design of the CRM system and the key customer processes that drive the integration need. It also requires detailed knowledge of the other applications, many of them complex back office applications. The ability to allow multiple people to participate in the development and design of the integration solution in a coordinated manner is essential. Each of the parties should be able to design their discrete piece and simply fold it into the broader solution. The other members of the project team should be able to easily understand the work others have done and should be able add their input and comments. Team members that have moved onto other projects should be able to easily move back into an active role.

So beyond these team development capabilities what does a collaborative approach to integration really mean? Over the new few weeks I will be exploring the 5 capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. This exploration should shed some light on the direction we are headed with our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight. So watch for my next post as we drill down on the first capability; Reusability.

Integrated ERP: Ignore it at Your Peril?

Improving the level of integration between ERP applications and the rest of the application infrastructure within the enterprise is increasingly becoming a hot topic among CFOs and CIOs of mid-market companies. Many of these executives are beginning to realize what a number of forward leaning companies have known for a while - there is a plethora of great information locked up in an ERP system. Properly integrated data across the enterprise enables companies to cut costs, increase revenue, make better decisions, and serve customers better.

At Scribe, we are constantly being asked to help our customers and partners justify the time and expense associated with these ERP integration efforts. Recently, I got together with Chris Dobkins, the CEO of Njevity, a long time Scribe partner to collaborate on a White Paper to tackle these very questions. The paper explores the direct effect of integrating a company's application infrastructure with its ERP backbone. It uses a number of real life customer examples to illustrate the value proposition and offers a few financial models designed to help you identify the real dollar impact on costs and revenues. Our hope is that it will be a useful tool for anyone considering an ERP integration effort.

You can get the White Paper by clicking on the thumbnail to the left.

On a personal note, I was a bit unsure about collaborating with anyone on a white paper. I have written a number of these in the past on my own and always found the process to be a lonely and solitary endeavor. My trepidation was quickly erased once I started working with Chris. For whatever reason, we just clicked. We quickly came to a common vision of the paper and each of our individual contributions added value on the way to that vision. And when we sat down together, it was almost like the person on the keyboard was typing what the other was thinking. Whether this great synergy yielded a good paper, we'll let you be the judge. In any event, we had so much fun working together that we're already planning the next installment that speaks to the how versus the why.

Stay tuned.

Peter Chase

Thinking outside the box – Supporting cross-company business processes with Scribe Insight

When thinking about Scribe, most partner or customers immediately think about integrating Microsoft Dynamics GP, NAV, SL and AX with their CRM system or with some other legacy application. True enough, for the Dynamics applications the Scribe Adapters offer rarely found powerful interoperability. But customer’s needs are not limited to connecting their own business applications, cross-business process models are moving more and more to the center of attention as businesses are becoming more and more interconnected. Alignment between these business models needs to be supported by IT solutions. Because of its flexibility and wide range of connectivity (application adapters, XML, Web Services, CSV), Scribe Insight has the perfect potential to support these requirements thus providing greater value to customers.

Already, numerous third party and legacy solutions have been created to allow Dynamics ERP customers to send product catalog data and receive order data with a hosted web shop system, exchange electronic invoices with their business partners or pick up warehouse commissioning and shipment information provided by their logistic partners. Significant message standards were established in the 1990's both in the US and Europe. These standards were originally intended to support the processes of Enterprise companies. However, more and more medium size businesses, that typically run Dynamics ERP systems, are forced to support these standards in order to stay in business. These standards provide an ideal scenario for building Scribe Templates, which are easily extended as needed, to support interconnected businesses. There are other solutions available in the Marketplace. However, only Scribe Insight is designed to operate with Microsoft Dynamics applications and provide the additional capabilities that businesses need for integrating their internal legacy, CRM and other mission critical business applications- whether they're deployed on-premise, hosted or cloud-based. The Scribe Insight platform is uniquely designed to address this wide spectrum of interconnected processes, both internal and cross-business processes. So, what is your current strategy for connecting your customer's Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics SL or Dynamics AX systems to their trading partners? Does it include Scribe Insight?