Integration Can Tame Your Business Processes
Posted by Margaret Dawson on October 12, 2009
At the Forrester Business Technology Forum last week, analysts Craig Le Clair, Chip Gliedman and George Lawrie led a humorous and informative session on “Untamed Business Processes”. Le Clair has written a report with the same name. While the three men came from different perspectives, there was a consistent theme that while packaged applications might be the foundation for most business processes, they are not able to fully manage or streamline complex business processes.
That’s because most apps are just answering the technology requirement, but not taking the full process or the people into account. What’s needed in addition to the application or middleware layer is a dynamic and flexible process that incorporates the people aspect. Ideas brought up included SOA, business process management, business intelligence, etc.
Interestingly, two of the most untamed business processes according to Le Clair are customer onboarding and order-to-cash. These are two key areas companies really need help with. I could not help but note that these happen to be two areas at which Hubspan excels.
One of the things our customers love about us is that we work directly with their customers, partners and suppliers for onboarding across many different processes, covering procurement, supply chain management, eCommerce, etc. One of the three components of the Hubspan Integration Platform is the services layer, which is the people services we provide, including client services, support and operations. Our client services team not only provides fast and capable on-boarding services but ongoing community and change management.
As Mayer Electric Supply’s CIO, Barry Carden, said so wonderfully in a recent news article: “The second beautiful part is that to get that integration going for a new customer, all I have to do is call up Hubspan and say, ‘Hey, I have got one here; hook ‘em up!’” Perhaps “hook em up” sounds overly simplistic, but customer onboarding, from the connection to figuring out the format, application, standards, business rules, authentication and other elements of the integration needed by Mayer’s customers is all handled by Hubspan, so to Mayer, it’s seamless and transparent.
And order-to-cash or order-to-invoice is one of the key packaged integration processes for customer integration, which includes the exchange of all business documents as well as real-time information exchange between a company and its customers from order through payment.
While integration might not be a panacea for untamed business processes, a SaaS-based integration platform that extends your applications and middleware and helps automate the overal business process with your key business communities is a strong and positive step toward improved control, reduced chaos and increased business value.
Tags: business process management, Business Processes, Chip Gliedman, Cloud Integration Platform, Craig Le Clair, customer integration, e-procurement, eProcurement, ERP, Forrester, George Lawrie, Integration Platform, SaaS, SOA
No Comments »
No comments yet.