Enabling Enterprise Integration

Accelerating Digitalization — Team SwiftAnt’s Viewpoint for Enterprise / B2B integrations

Let us start this discussion by asking, why is integration so important?

Business Case for seamless integration: Research proves that B2B Digital Leaders turn in much stronger financial performance and establish competitive market differentiation as their Order to Cash cycles are very low (when compared to customers). Such digital leaders also deliver much higher customer delight, with visible and simplified supply chain. So, the maxim is simple and straight-forward i.e., “interconnecting islands of automation takes a lot of inefficiencies out of business processes”.

What is the problem? When the business case is so clear — what is delaying the legacy businesses to come out and address the seamless integration challenges? We think the problem lies in old school thought process + mindset issues.

· Old school thought process: Integration is an assembly of disparate custom batch-jobs. Legacy businesses relied (and continue to rely) on custom programmed ETL jobs or batch interfaces (most of them without the source code + the source programming languages that are not supported any longer).

· Mindset issue: Digitalization takes a long time + it is a tedious and costly exercise. We do not have time for this.

Let us start by addressing the mindset issue first — Digitalization, when correctly done, will be much faster to implement. Digitalization must start with clarity of current business processes and a clear intent to throw out the inefficiencies in the current business processes.

Fundamental question: Is the Digitalization not meant for creating newer business models? Yes, we do agree that final state of Digitalization is enabling the business with newer business models. However, the first state is the seamless integration of current business processes, which leads towards the final state of business model innovation. This can be emphasized in a simple analogy that “A building is only as good as its foundation”. In this context, a robust foundation will be established when integration of business processes is achieved. Only then the Digital Transformation barriers will be overcome and the building (Digitalization) becomes stronger.

Fusion of Reverse and Re: Digitalization can be planned to be the fusion of Reverse-Engineering (to understand the current, which is based on the past) and Re-Engineering (set the direction for current and future) with below approach:

1. Set the direction

2. Analyze the current processes

3. Document and discuss

4. Derive the Digitalization actionable roadmap

As part of the Digitalization roadmap design and development, emphasis must be laid on below:

1. Cloud based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with engineered real-time interfaces

2. Zero code cloud-based connectors by leveraging the benefits of API economy

3. Business intelligence, right at the integration layer (and not as an afterthought). The integration layer acts as a Data hub through which the Big Data flows and it unlocks Business and Cognitive Intelligence possibilities and addresses the problem of Visibility

4. Selecting the IT Partner, who is willing to implement the end to end integration platform — with ZERO CAPEX and charge you for the volume of business transactions passing through the new integration layer. In today’s pandemic times, when cash flow is a concern, having a capable partner is of utmost importance.

Just in case you are thinking that, by implementing all the above 4, you will be pioneer in leveraging the Cloud based integration platforms — perhaps, you are not correct as many have already done so. It is never late to be part of this journey and get benefitted by realizing the benefits depicted: