App-to-App or Process-to-Process Integration
Posted by Mike Canniff on March 8, 2011
In my first post, “Expert View of Business Process Integration”, I provided an overview of the key issues to address when implementing integrations between corporations in a B2B scenario. Today’s topic deals with integrating business processes.
As with any large scale project, an effective habit is to start with the end in mind. An enterprise that needs to exchange data with other companies is fundamentally trying to solve a business problem. The goal should be something along the lines of “How can we automate transmission of sales orders and increase data quality (or reduce data entry error rates)”.
Embedded within this goal may be the need to connect the vendor’s NetSuite application with the customer’s SAP implementation. But these technical connectivity issues should rank secondary to the primary goal of integrating order processing.
So the “big” process picture involves the following items:
- Business Process Management – One needs to model the actual physical process that is being automated. This can be comprised of workflows, document management, approvals and exception handling. A workflow can be initiated by a physical event, such as the manual creation of a sales order, the arrival of a Request for Quote, or a timed event (such as a Payroll direct deposit batch). The system needs to route transaction to the correct internal participants. Hard copy and/or electronic documents also need to be tracked within the business process. For example, a paper contract may need to be scanned and attached to orders. As a workflow executes, various approval steps may be routed to different actors within the company. If any errors occur during the business process, automated alerts need to be triggered.
- Transaction Sequences – In addition, a business process may span multiple transactions between companies. For example, order acknowledgements are in response to an original order document. The acknowledgment may include actionable content that the originator needs to update in their system (for example, invalid order item codes). So integration software must group sequences of messages that are logically related to one another. Most data integration tools just track individual transactions (or batches) and when complete, the integration scenario is complete. But this focuses too much on the data connections
- Integration Connection: A connector typically represents the final touch points of the integration. There exists a defined source and target connection in all integration scenarios. As a base requirement, integration applications need a large library of connectors. This can range from older database technologies (such as Btrieve) to latest DBMS offerings (IBM DB2, SQL Server) to applications (SAP, Salesforce) to general web services (XML based). These connectors implement the “last mile” solution of the business process.
- Monitoring and Audits: The system must monitor and provide historical audit trails for the business processes. This topic will be covered in more detail in Part 4 of this series.
An additional challenge when automating business processes is the choice of which applications implement each step. ERP systems have progressed to the point of having fairly strong workflow, approval, and document management features. They can also import and export data with a variety of protocols.
One could argue that ERP as the system of record should manage the business process. But ERP is inherently focused on a corporation’s internal operations. ERP typically does not support cross enterprise integration scenarios.
This is where B2B software solutions play a key role. At a minimum they provide the connectivity. But B2B software also manages the complete transaction sequence and process.
So there exist design choices between where to execute the business process. A general rule of thumb may be based on how many internal applications participate within a complete B2B process. In a single ERP scenario, then the ERP application could orchestrate the process. With multiple ERPs and proprietary applications, then it makes more sense for the B2B software to manage the process.
This blog is part of Hubspan’s Expert Blog Series, featuring industry experts and analysts in cloud computing, integration, application architecture, and IT management.
Tags: B2B software, business process automation, business process management, ERP integration, Order-to-Invoice
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