Understanding Enterprise Integration

Enterprise Integration

• Organizations have heavily invested in IT, resulting in large portfolios of IT systems and thousands of applications.
• Businesses integrate IT applications to meet new requirements, like automatically transferring customer data from the sales system to billing.
• Integration can increase efficiency through automation, but it was often tactical, not strategic, in its early forms.
• Custom interfaces between IT applications were expensive and time-consuming.
• Enterprise integration is a strategic approach using relevant processes, methods, tools, and tech.
• It achieves interoperability between IT applications within and outside the business, enabling collaboration.
• Enterprise integration considers business processes that span IT applications, thus using technology integration to enable a larger business plan.
• Enterprise integration coordinates business processes across different parts of the enterprise from a business point of view.
• This process involves multiple stakeholders, and takes a strategic view rather than just a localized or tactical one.
• It addresses today's business requirements, and is essential to how IT solutions should be designed.
• generic business problems that enterprise integration can address including information aggregation, single point of data entry, web channel integration, & supplier and supply chain optimization.
• Information aggregation consolidates and presents data from multiple IT sources into a single view.
• A single point of data entry replaces manual, duplicate entries across multiple IT applications.
• Web channel integration provides web-based customers and partners direct access to the services provided by existing business systems.
• Supplier and supply chain optimization enable a supplier to integrate with a larger company's processes.

Assessing Enterprise Integration Needs

• Consider enterprise integration if real-time data collation from multiple IT systems is needed to meet business objectives.
• Evaluate if many IT systems need to communicate, or if there's a need to update the same data in separate systems.
• Enterprise integration might be needed when extracting information from one IT system to another is difficult/time-consuming.
• Also if if information is duplicated or data is inconsistent across many IT systems.

Integration Strategies

• Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) integrates IT applications within an organization, such as customer accounts with order management.
• Business-to-Business Integration (B2Bi) integrates an organization's IT system with those of its business partners or suppliers.
• Web Integration integrates an organization's IT application with a web application.
• Data Integration synchronizes data across different databases, like customer address changes.
• Application Integration allows applications to directly access functionality from others using APIs.
• Service Integration is where reusable services are offered to various apps.
• Process Integration defines business-process or workflow models that reusable services call.

Levels of Integration

• Presentation Integration aggregates data from multiple IT systems into a single view, e.g., displaying a customer's stock portfolio with bank balance.

SAP Partner Implementation and Resources

• A consulting company resells SAP solutions to SMEs.
• The consulting company's sales team purchases SAP Business One user licenses.
• The consulting company ("Partner") is responsible for implementation and support of Appliance Hub Corporation ("End Customer“).
• SAP is responsible for defects in the SAP Business One software.
• Consultants are assigned to Appliance Hub Corporation implementing consultants are engaged after the sales team signs a contract with SAP.

Accelerated Implementation Program (AIP)

• Successful implementation partners follow a structured phased implementation process.
• The AIP methodology divides implementation into five phases.
• The AIP phases cover from the handover from the sales team to right before the handover to the support organization.
• The AIP methodology provides a milestone for each phase marking completion of activities like software installation, system configuration, and testing.
• The AIP methodology materials are published as a template, allowing partners to adapt the methodology.

Project Preparation

• The customer transitions from the sales cycle to implementation mode in the first phase: Project Preparation.

• Key activities for the implementation partner are to conduct a project handover with the sales team, create a project plan, conduct a kick-off meeting, & provide the SAP software.

• Key team members are appointed during the sales cycle.

• To keep the project focused and on track, four milestones in this first phase should be completed.

• First, all aspects of the sales process; (customer background, business processes, any risk or constraints, and any special or unusual requirements) must be clearly understood.

• Second, the kick-off meeting marks the official start of the project which gives the opportunity to create a relationship with the customer team and to set correct expectations for the implementation.

• Third, the installation of the software which is important in installing all the relevant software + add-ons.

• Fourth, the last milestone is the checkpoint, to determine that the customer is happy and does not have unrealistic expectations before the project moves on.

• AIP methodology is as a control mechanism for keeping the project on track.