Monthly Archives: March 2011

Want to integrate your applications, don’t know where to start?

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Need to integrate some systems for your business?  Not sure how much it will cost or where to start?

Our integration planning guide has some information on how to plan your integration.  Maybe you want to get a quote before you plan, to determine your ROI and decide if you want to take it further.

How do you go about that?  What information do you need to provide a company like WDCi to enable them to give you a quote for your integration?

The key is in describing your use-case(s) and your business objective(s).

Here are some simple tips:

1. Describe your business process that you want automated – avoid any technical ideas or data level detail (that can come later).  Some simple business processes (use-cases) might be:

  • When I change my Sales Opportunity to closed/won, I’d like an invoice to be created automatically in my financial system. When the invoice is paid, I’d like visibility of that payment in my sales system OR
  • When I add certain tasks to my projects (in my project management system), I’d like these tasks to generate bug issues in my issue tracking system.  When the bugs are updated or completed, I’d like those updates to be reflected back in the project management tool – providing visibility to the PM. OR
  • I need to synchronise my Customer data across our CRM, ERP and Sales Automation systems.  When a Customer is updated in one of them, I want that information to be reflected in the other two systems.

2. If you understand the process flow and sequence of events, draw that up, it will help you flesh out how it really works.  Your drawing could be just a few simple boxes and arrows, as long as it describes the flow you expect.   If you don’t understand the flow, focus on the high level detail of describing the process in plain language.

3. Identify the systems you want integrated, what version are you running?

4. Contact us

If you focus on the applications involved and the business process you want to automate between these applications – we’ll take it from there, work with you and provide a quick quote for your review.

Whats involved in testing an integration involving 3 applications?

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Following on from our recent blog on Salesforce – Netsuite – OpenAir integration.

What’s involved in testing an integration like this and how much time do you and your customer want to spend testing?.  If your integration takes 20 days to design and build, what %age of that time should you spend testing?  In our experience that depends on the following:

Process complexity:

  • How complex are the integrations, are there any two-way or three-way synchronisations, ie are Customer details synchronised bi-directionally across applications.

Manual steps:

  • Are there any manual steps to the process, these can introduce strange behaviours to the process if they are not followed correctly.

Application dependencies:

  • What field incompatibilities could we encounter, i.e. by default Salesforce allows an Account name to be very long, whilst Netsuite only allows 40 characters.  Do we setup validations in the applications to handle this?  This is both a design and testing consideration.

Process dependencies:

  • Are there sub-processes?  i.e. does an Invoice create require a Customer create and if so, what happens if one of the processes fail?

Operational dependencies:

  • What volume is involved and can we simulate the volume in testing?
  • Are there organisational factors at play that require immediate deployment?
  • Are there budget and resource limitations?

Unfortunately there’s no formula, complexity, time and budget all comes into play.

Integrating Salesforce, Netsuite and OpenAir

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We’ve recently built out an end-end process integrating Salesforce, Netsuite and OpenAir.

The end-end process goes like this:

  • Successful Opportunities in Salesforce generate Sales Orders in Netsuite.  Opportunities of a specific type also generate Netsuite Projects and OpenAir projects.
  • Payment updates are synchronised across from Netsuite to Salesforce, providing visibility to the sales team.
  • Project updates are synchronised from OpenAir to Netsuite and Salesforce, providing visibility to finance as well as sales teams.
  • Netsuite is the Item master and Item details are synchronised to Salesforce Products.
  • When a Customer create is required in Netsuite (in order to generate a Sales Order) or OpenAir (for Project creation), the integration processes handles this as well.

End result:

  • No re-keying of data for invoicing purposes
  • The Services Team has instant visibility into new projects just sold by Sales
  • Sales has visibility into payment status for their clients
  • Sales has visibility into project delivery status for their clients
  • Finance has visibility into project delivery status for invoicing and revenue recognition purposes

Complexity:

  • There were some complexities with the customer’s Item/Product data
  • Salesforce was enhanced with custom objects to store the invoicing and project data and link that to the original opportunity
  • The main challenge was bring the parties together and defining the business process flow

Want to know more, just contact us for the details.

Microsoft Dynamics AX integration

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Dynamics AX integration may seem like a daunting task. Suppose that you have a SaaS based Sales Automation tool like Salesforce, or a CRM system like Netsuite or RightNow. Integration in real or near real time to your AX Financial system could provide huge benefit to your business.

WDCi have recently integrated to Dynamics AX using Boomi technology and a web Services connector that we created for the task. Integration of Accounts, Contacts, Sales Orders etc is certainly possible, and within reach of SME clients, not just Large Enterprise.

If you would like more information contact us at WDCi