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In todays business environment businesses need to operate with increased flexibility, and respond quickly to changing market-n-customer demands. They need to enable systems that provide correct information quickly. Human errors should be reduced and monies saved. Timely access to information also enables strategic-decisions to be made quickly and also helps measure the success in changes that are made. Automating systems improves operational efficiency for the supply-chain, and gets the right products at the right place at the right times. Automating redundant tasks and simplifying processes frees people to focus on core business functions. Integrating systems allows people to access real-time data, thereby lessening delays and stoppages. Reviewing an integrated view of customer-information provides capability to analyze and gain insights. We can help Utilize Business Integration Technologies: To Integrate Business Processes - this would: Better customer service by reducing time to respond to questions and needs; Grow Revenue by leveraging assets and extending systems to meet increasingly complex requirements; Reduce Inventory by increasing processes efficiencies; Enable Faster Decision-making (internal); To Connect Applications - this would: Increase productivity and lower education costs - reducing number of applications that an employee must learn to use; Reduce costs of writing and maintaining customized code running on top of applications; Information from multiple sources can be aggregated; To Exchange Information - this would: Increase accuracy in data due to fewer manual processes; Increase customer-satisfaction - since representatives have a single-point of access to information; Cost savings can also be achieved through information dissemination and aggregation, where data from many applications can be propagated to a single store (data-warehouse) ... Or, used to disseminate data to many applications - ensuring data-synchronization in real-time, within the organization, without using complex customized solutions. Integration also provides a gateway to partners (suppliers) to maintain description of their products, in the businesses store, to facilitate integrated Ordering. Following are diagrams and notes of a Parts Requisition Process.

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The above diagram represents the before condition ... With each step being performed manually ... By a number of people ... Using different applications. The following sequence corresponds to the numbers in the diagram above: 1. A supervisor observes parts are needed. He uses the Requisitions application to create a requisition to request additional parts (items) to be supplied. 2. The requisition is printed and a copy is submitted to the person responsible for keeping track of suppliers, orderable items, and the cost to purchase these items. This person uses the Catalog application. 3. To evaluate the requisition, the Catalog application is used to check that the items requested are valid (are in the catalog). If any are invalid then the requisition is returned for correction. 4. If they are all valid then the requisition is updated to include item descriptions based on the catalog as well as the total cost to order all the items. A copy is then submitted to the person responsible for ensuring there are sufficient funds to order the items contained in the requisition. This person uses the Budget application 5. The Budget application is used to determine if the submitting organization has sufficient funds in its budget to order items and to track how much the current organization has spent. If there are sufficient funds, then the amount spent by this organization is updated, and the requisition is marked as ready for ordering. If there are insufficient funds, then the requisition is returned to the submitter indicating the lack of funding. 6. After the funding is confirmed the requistion can be sent to the Accounting application where a purchase order can be created.

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The second diagram shows the complexity involved with writing and maintaining custom integration code - when using an integrated approach - it involves customizing each application to exchange information. This approach can quickly become costly and difficult to maintain.

Further development would be required to coordinate the activity between the applications so they could work together to complete the process for getting requisitions ready for ordering. Such customizations would require either modifications to the application source code or writing glue code that uses the Applications Programming Interface (APIs). The custom code would need to be tightly integrated with each application in order to share information between them. For example, the custom code would need to pass part numbers from the Requisitions application to the Inventory application. The custom code would also need to perform process tasks such as calculating costs and checking the budget. And the custom code would need to maintain the information required for the requisition that is sent to the final approver.

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The third diagram shows the preferred method of integration based on our Solution - starting point! Please Note This Is Just ONE Example.

A process integrator coordinates the exchange of information and provides flexibility to address and enhance business process requirements. A connector is any component that provides connectivity between two other components. The connector you use depends on the interface available for the particular applications. Since each connector is built to meet the needs for a specific application interface, the job of connecting diverse applications is much easier. This integration approach is the best option because you remove customer pains such as managing multiple sources of data or dealing with delays because the business process no longer depends on manually completing multiple steps using different applications. Several manual steps can be eliminated. This solution provides a method for using predefined components to create a running integration system quickly based on the customer's application interfaces and business process.