In our industry (mobile field business operations or workforce automation), the customer has a great focus on integration. He wants all the business data produced by all his business applications to be consolidated in one single place. He usually operates in the backoffice some big-brand ERP servers such as Oracle E-Biz (Order Module and Inventory Module, …), MFG Pro, MS Navision, and wants to use MS5 as a tool to extend his control to the information flow on the field. The ERP stops at the door of the warehouse, and in the field, activities are handled by PDA. The natural expectation of the IT manager is to have the info from both sources unified (integrated) somewhere.
In most people mind, either customers or integrators, integration is some obscure magic. Thus the customer is afraid from the unknown, and sticks to a position equivalent to “show me it can integrate, and I will buy”, meaning in fact “show me it is integrated and I will buy”.
Technically speaking, the integration is the process of building a number of bridges between the middleware (MW) of MS5 and the ERP in order to have the main data and the main processes executed on PDA and impacted on the field, to be displayed in ERP as their status are changed over the operations flow with the customers, and the warehouses over the salesman/deliveryman day.
This definition implies that the scope of the integration can grow and shrink depending on the expectations of the customer regarding which field data exactly should be escalated to the ERP. Therefore the integration is something by definition that should be precisely specified before being implemented.
So by implementing integration, we means a project to be executed over time with the cooperation with the final user, with possibly adaptation of the requirements during the project course. And finally we means a cost charged to the customer often higher than the licences cost itself.
To reduce delays and the cost, we want the work to be done as much as possible by the customer itself, so he can also increase his control. For this purpose, we provide him within our application MS5, with a tool that allows to prepare and setup for automatic integration. This import tool allows to setup and save a fields mapping between the data as expected by the MS5 MW, and the data as expected by the ERP. Once this mapping is saved, it can be used with another tools provided with MS5: two CLI (Command Line Interface) tools for export and import of data and which can be scheduled for automatic execution at regular interval of the day using the Windows Scheduler.
To reduce even more delays and the cost, we suggest to the customer to even before raising to integration issue, to run a small pilot for real for a period of time to gather some operational data on the field. When real data starts to stock into the warehouse, the IT manager is able to apprehend them. So the process of integration will apply on real data and the IT manager will decide by himself what data needs to be escalated to the backoffice and which does not. Therefore accelerating the work of integration by reducing the unnecessary exploratory steps that he would have done if he had started with the Integration directly.
Tags: ERP, Integration, Mobility, PDA
