Sales System Integration : Seeing the big picture

Integration in the business: Seeing the big picture

The digital business landscape is getting more complex all the time. Those days are over, ,when the business had less than a dozen systems to handle most of its business processes, those days are over. Today's businesses have hundreds or even thousands of different applications that they either buy or build themselves, or a mix of the two.

This is on top of a set of old systems that are still being kept around.

Nowadays, it is very common to find that an enterprise has dozens of websites, multiple instances of ERP systems, and many other departmental applications, in addition to several data warehouses or lakes.

One of the reasons why businesses end up in these kinds of situations is that building business applications is hard.

"It is almost impossible to build a single app that runs all business processes."

Maintaining it and adapting to day-to-day business challenges and requested changes is even more challenging. It has always made sense to break up business tasks into smaller applications.

It gives the business the flexibility and speed it needs to move at the pace it needs to, instead of being limited by the technical limits of a bigger all-in-one solution.

It also gives the business the chance to pick and choose the best set of applications for their needs. This would require putting together the best customer relationship management (CRM), order management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

In the last 20 years or so, we've seen vendors offer focus applications for specific core functions. We also noticed that new features were being added to applications all the time, which led to some kind of functionality spillover. For example, we've seen a lot of customer service software get added on to so that it could do some limited billing. This is because it's hard to make clear functional separations between systems. For example, if a customer has a problem with a bill, does that fall under the responsibility of customer service or the billing applications?

On the other hand, users don't really care about these limits or the systems that are involved behind the scenes.

They expect a business function to be carried out, no matter which system or systems are used.

For example, when a customer places an online order, it's likely that several systems will need to work together to do things like check the customer's history or credit score, check the inventory, figure out the tax, create the order, fill the order, handle shipment, send a bill, collect payment, and more.

These processes can involve more than one system, but from the customer's point of view, it was just one transaction, which sets a lot of expectations.

So that these distributed functions, which are still expected to work as a single business process, can be supported, these applications must be integrated in a way that is efficient, secure, scalable, and reliable.

Some of the most common needs for enterprise integration are:

Threading knowledge by combining particular pieces of information created by different systems and enterprise business processes. This information needs to be organized in a way that makes it easy to use and can help with other business needs.

Handle information transactions across different terrains, which may use different technology stacks and run on different servers, hardware, and operating systems.

Real time , right time:

In an ideal situation, this means that the information needs to be sent out in real time so that it reflects the actual state of a certain data entity.

Change-ability and the ability to adapt: This is done to adapt to outside factors like market demand, a change in how customers act, new laws, or a change in how people think about life.

Task Co-ordination: This is a difficult task that may require modelling the enterprise business's processes, how they are linked, and what kind of information they share. To do this, you might need to know a lot about the business and have a deep understanding of it.

So, what makes a good architecture for integration?

...(to be continued in next article)