Maximize Data-drivenOutcomes

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eBook

Simplify integration with Boomi intelligence

Contents02 Introduction

05 Types of integration

07 Integration challenges

09 Dell Boomi - a leading iPaaS

10 Common use cases

13 Best practices

Identify Problemsand Root Cause

02

Introduction

Integration: A necessity

Welcome to the "Maximize Data-Driven Outcome, Simplify Integration with Boomi Intelligence" eBook. We will cover Enterprise Integration key areas, which will help you build a Simplified, Efficient, Robust, and Scalable Integrated Experience. This eBook further discusses several Integration challenges and how you can overcome those with the help of a cloud-native Boomi IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service).

This eBook will also guide you on some of the Best Practices of Integration Implementation. You will find several integration use-cases and recommended designs to build integrations for application, B2B/EDI, Master Data Management while focusing on business processes like Order to Cash, Revenue Recognition, Employee Onboarding, and B2B / EDI integrations.

Covid-19 Pandemic has uncovered the vulnerabilities in many organization's IT and Business processes. One of the main causes for the disruption was the disconnected IT environment. Many organizations failed to respond fast because of manual business processes and a lack of agility. They didn't have the right data at the right time. They didn't estimate demand and supply correctly. The supply chain got severely impacted because of the low visibility of supplier activities.

On the other hand, Organizations with integrated IT environment and connected business were able to respond fast. They were able to communicate quickly with their partners and suppliers. The automated B2B communication helped them coordinate with suppliers and partners and onboard new partners to mitigate the supply risk. There were able to collect the right data from several data sources, which helped them access the impact and market demand and supply.

The common thing among most of the organizations who responded well was – They had their IT and Business fully connected. Connected Internal applications like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) helped them efficiently process Lead-to-Cash to revenue recognition. Connected External Processes like B2B/ EDI helped them with efficient supplier transactions like purchase orders, invoicing, shipping, remittances, and so on. Organizations depend on several business processes like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, B2B/B2C, etc., based on their business model.

Organizations have always considered adopting Low-Code Integration as OPTIONAL. They have been somehow managing with custom integrations or leveraging heavyweight Legacy integration platforms in their enterprise. COVID19 Pandemic has uncovered the vulnerabilities in the IT capabilities of such organizations. The year 2020 has taught companies that de-prioritizing an Intelligent Integration strategy was a costly affair.

Due to rigidness in custom coded integration and usage of legacy integration platforms, these companies have not responded to market demands. The impacts have been so harmful that many small-to-large businesses failed to survive. According to S&P Global, disruptions have impacted many industries across Manufacturing, Travel, Hospitality, Automotive, Retail, Logistics, Financial Services, and many others.

If applications are not connected and are working in silos, moving a simple order from CRM to ERP can take several hours. With an integrated CRM and ERP, you can process in seconds.

Companies with a long-term Integration strategy in place and responded to market changes rapidly converted these disruptions into opportunities and shaped winning strategies for their businesses. It is no longer a secret that companies need to adopt a low-code application and data integration strategy to build resilient IT capabilities. As a Business or IT leader, if you have the right data at the right time, you can create the right strategy and operate with flexibility.

In the age of digital transformation, a connected business is a successful business because it is faster, smarter, cost-effective, and more flexible. To be digitally capable, it is imperative to transform the organization's manual or partially automated business processes, silos applications, and systems to fully automated Connected Business to offer faster and compelling customer experience and services. There are many benefits of a Connected Business. The major ones are:

Connected applications help building the efficient business processes – E.g., Quote to Cash, Order Management etc.

Improved productivity and cost savings Increased operational efficiency to move / act / respond faster.

Real time and improved data accessibility for people in the organizations.

Agility to adapt to changing markets and competition.

Identify Problems

03

Benefits of Connected Business

We understand that integration is no more OPTIONAL. It is a NECESSITY. Integration can help you connect every part of your business, whether you need to connect your applications, collect data from internal or external sources or automate transactions with external parties. We can classify integration into five categories.

The adoption of the new best of breed applications within organizations occurs rapidly and in many cases at an uncontrolled pace. Each part of the organization makes its own technology decisions and moves forward with implementation as best as it can. However, organizations invest a loss in these applications. Even though they give better results, organizations don't get the best value of their investment if these best of breed applications are running in silos and are not fully connected.

04

Application to Application (A2A)

As depicted in Fig – 1, there are several applications an organization might have. Application to Application Integration helps connect these applications and fasten end-to-end business processes.

Application to Application (A2A)

Data Integration

B2B / EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)

Master Data Management / Master Data Synchronization

Types of Integration

Take a simple scenario of Order-to-Cash (Fig - 2). In a typical sales cycle, a salesperson manages the sales opportunity in CRM applications such as Salesforce. Once the opportunity is closed won, it needs to be fulfilled by the customer. Companies use ERP applications such as NetSuite for Order processing and fulfillment. ERP application needs the customer and the opportunity/order data to process the order and fulfillment.

05

Data Integration

B2B / EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)

If CRM and ERP applications are not integrated, the Order processing team will manually enter the CRM data into the ERP application. Manual effort can be massive if there are high volume orders that could potentially delay the entire order fulfillment process and an unhappy customer. On the other hand, if both the applications are integrated, the order to cash process can be performed in seconds.

Whether you're building data applications, departmental reports, dashboards, machine learning models and solutions, or industry-specific analytics, you need to gather data from several data sources in various formats such as JSON and XML Database, CSV, EDI, and so on. Data Integration helps connect with data sources and collect data for further cleansing, exploratory, and modeling. Every type of integration deals with data. In A2A, applications share data. We can also term 'Data Integration' for 'Big-Data' and 'Data Science' use cases.

You can see the very first step after the business problem understanding is the Data Collection. All other stages in the workflow depending on collected data. Here, a data integration strategy and technology help gather the correct data from the right sources.

B2B / EDI integration is meant to effectively integrate with all of your vendors, suppliers, distributors, and more. An integrated partner ecosystem helps in building resiliency in the overall supply chain. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the computer-to-computer exchange of business documents, such as invoices and POs in a typical electronic format between business partners. An Integrated EDI ecosystem helps in fast transaction processing, reduces operation cost, improves data quality, improves business efficiency and data security. There are several strategic business benefits such as a leader you can make a fast decision, more responsive to the changing customer demands. In Covid-19 Pandemic, the organization with an integrated B2B / EDI ecosystem was able to onboard new suppliers faster than others and respond well to the customer demands.

A typical Data Science stage and workflow is depicted in Fig - 3.

Fig - 4 depicts an automated EDI processing between Buyer and Supplier with the EDI integration. There is no need for email, mail, or faxes, Time- consuming and error-prone processes.

CollectData

Visualize & Understand

Data Prep and

ModelingTrain Evaluate Deploy

Data Science Stages and Workflow

Feedback

Business

06

Master Data Management / Master Data Synchronization

In a typical enterprise, several applications hold master records like customer details, product details, etc. Specific departments manage departmental applications. For example - Sales Operations owns CRM application, Order processing and fulfillment team manages ERP application. As different people manage the different applications, the data between two applications may get out of sync if any application owners update their own application. Master Data Management or Master Data Synchronization helps create a single source of truth for enterprise master data such as Customer, Partners, and Product records. Integration plays a significant role in inbound and outbound data between several applications and the Master Data Management system.

Data Synchronization can be done with a point-to-point Integration, but that gets complicated when you have more than 2 applications. For example, if you have 4 applications, you might have to build 12 integration flows to sync data between these 4 applications. If you want to add 4 more applications, you would need to build 56 integration processes, as depicted in Fig 5.

One of the best approaches to have multiple applications in sync is having a single source of truth. Keep all the cleansed and enriched data in a central data hub or repository. Instead of point-to-point integration between applications, connect applications with Master Data Hub or Repository as depicted in Fig - 6. It drastically reduces the complexity and helps keep the data accurate with a simplified and scalable architecture.

Fig - 5

Fig - 6

4 applications - 4 Processes 8 applications - 8 Processes

4 applications - 12 Processes 8 applications - 56 Processes

07

Working with legacy platforms is one of the most problematic tasks. Most of the legacy integration platforms require a heavy infrastructure setup and ongoing maintenance. These platforms are rigid with limited or no innovation capability. Legacy integration platforms mostly depend on outdated technology and heavy coding. We need to write codes even for small tasks like setting up the connectivity with on-premise or cloud applications, mapping the source and target fields, or applying any business rules. Any incremental changes can force re-packaging entire codes and require re-deployments and validation.

Legacy platforms are not very user-friendly and lack out-of-the-box features such as data transformational functions, pre-built connectors, reporting, and dashboards. Nowadays, we see organizations adopting new applications at a rapid pace. This makes it imperative to have a modern low-code platform.

Integration Challenges

Legacy Outdated Platforms

Data comes in several forms like structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. When building integration, there is a big challenge to process various data, which could be in several formats like JSON, XML, CSV, Database, EDI, etc. It Is essential to make sure that the integration platform supports these formats. In many cases, you will require to integrate two or more applications supporting different forms. For example, suppose you want to extract data from Salesforce and store it in a SQL database. In that case, you need to first extort the data from Salesforce in XML / JSON format and then convert it to Database format before you store the data in the database. Understanding of various data formats and platform capability to support and process these formats are critical.

Lack of Integration Skills

Data security is the major aspect of integration. You will never want to compromise with data security. You must ensure that the data and valuable information moving between cloud and on-premise applications are secured and protected from unauthorized users and malicious attackers. But it is also crucial that this protected data, such as credit card information or Social Security numbers, be immediately accessible to authorized, legitimate users and systems to conduct business transactions. Choosing the right secured platform, establishing the network and application security, encryption, decryption, data masking, and data recovery strategy are some of the most critical aspects of a secured, integrated business.

Data Security

In this section, we will discuss major integration challenges you might be facing when trying to build and maintain a robust integration solution:

Legacy Outdated Platforms

Lack of Integration Skills

Handling Variety of Data

Data Security

Data Management

Future Architecture and Design

High Cost of Ownership

Identify Problemsand Root Cause

08

Data Management such as Master Data, Governance, and Quality requires extensive planning and strategy. Integration is not about just connecting the applications. It is much more than that. Integration helps get value out of data and automates business processes across the enterprise to achieve desired accelerated business outcomes. Getting a 360˚ view of customers, employees, partners, patients, etc., becomes challenging as it requires synchronizing data among multiple applications across the organization and build a single source of truth.

Data Management

Reducing the entire cost of ownership is one of the top challenges of any organization. Integration projects, if not managed and executed correctly, can be very costly. Several reasons increase ownership cost, such as heavyweight integration platform, infrastructure cost associated with on-premise setup, time-consuming coding vs. low-code development, lack of right resources, and skillsets, lack of business agility, as well as the post-deployment operational cost.

Future Architecture And Design

Architecturing and designing a scalable solution is very critical for the success of any integration initiative. Designing a solution focusing on long-term scalability and future adoptions is one of the most demanding tasks. Considering the future roadmap, the start is paramount because we must evaluate all integrations for the future. A high number of integration projects fail to meet the desired performance. Architecturing and designing the integration solution which can be fast and effective is the major challenge in any integration implementation. Performance is dependent on how you design the integration process and the integration platform, and its underlying scalability.

High Cost Of Ownership

09

Dell Boomi - A Leading iPaaS

There are several integration platforms available in the market. But, there are various differentiators which make Boomi the right choice for all size of organizations.

Boomi platform is not just an integration platform, but it has several services features, as depicted in Fig - 7. (refer to the more defined image from the PPT slide 12)

Boomi Differentiators

Boomi - A Unified Platform

Dell Boomi is a unified platform delivering end-to-end capabilities including Integration, Master Data Hub, B2B/EDI Management, API Management, Flow and Data Catalogue, and Preparation.

Near to zero code platform

Superior ease of use plus AI/ML-based crowd-sourced intelli gence boosts productivity for both technical and non-technical users

Resilient, scalable, and secure cloud-native Multi-Tenant architecture

Industry-leading innovation delivered through continuous upgrades

A leader in Gartner magic quadrant 7 straight years in a row.

Its speed and time to value is 5 to 6 times any legacy middleware

Auto-updates do not require any hardware or software upgrades. There is no impact on existing integrations, so users don't have to worry about reengineering the existing integrations to make them compatible with the platform updates.

So far, we have discussed why integration is a necessity, various types of integration, and a few of the significant challenges an organization encounters with integration. We will now focus on how Boomi iPaaS overcomes the integration challenges and helps build a robust integration solution with low-code/no-code intelligence.

Dell Boomi Quickly and easily unites everything in a digital ecosystem so businesses can achieve better outcomes faster. Its intelligent, flexible, scalable platform accelerates business results by making it faster and easier to link data, systems, applications, processes, and people. By channeling the power of the cloud to unify everything inside and outside a business, Dell Boomi provides a robust fabric of connectivity with the speed and agility to lead the future.

Boomi Differentiators

Boomi - A Unified Platform

A typical customer journey has many milestones such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Service, and Loyalty. Each of these milestones has a Physical as well as a digital touchpoint. Companies use various ways like Radio, TV ads, PR, and Online displays to inform customers about their products and services. The customer consideration phase is where customers spend much time researching the products, visiting companies' websites, social media, etc. Once the customer is gratified with the product, he/she purchases the product or services through mobile apps or websites or other available buying options. After purchase, the customer expects good service in case of any product or service issues, new releases, etc. If the customer is happy with the product or services and the customer services, they may want to repeat business and become loyal.

In this entire journey, technology has a significant role to play. Each phase has several digital touchpoints that need to work in an integrated fashion to quickly convert a prospect into a customer and then into a loyal customer. For example, Data collection from social media, surveys, emails, etc., provide great insight into customers' needs and expectations.

E-commerce websites, payment gateways, customer support applications need to work seamlessly, and data should flow from one to the other end almost in real-time. Integration between these various applications helps companies make the customer journey pleasant for their customers, resulting in accelerated business outcomes and growth.

Common Use Cases

Customer Journey

In this section, we will explore some of the common integration use cases which could be relevant for all types of organizations looking for building an integrated business.

Customer Journey

Order-to-Cash (A2A)

Master Data Synchronization

EDI and Supply Chain Automation

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Identify Problemsand Root Cause

Delivering an extraordinary customer experience requires integrated lead-to-cash workflow and unified customer data. Standalone CRM and ERP/billing applications translate to unstable processes and information that hurt customer satisfaction. Those applications and data silos can slow internal efficiency and financial flow. For Order-to-Cash, Integration focuses on interoperability between CRM(such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics) and ERP (NetSuite, Oracle, SAP).

Connecting CRM to ERP provides end-to-end automation with a unified source of customer and revenue data. The right integration simplifies the creation of simple to very sophisticated workflows and functionality to accelerate processes while your personnel focuses on delighting customers.

Fig - 9 depicts the data flow between CRM and ERP applications, which can help implement a right and simplified solution to automate the Order to Cash process.

One of the significant use cases of any organization is to have data synchronized across the various applications. You can consider Master data Management as a database with cleanses and enriches data (single source of truth). In MDM terms, the records stored in Master data Management are referred to as golden records. Instead of point-to-point or direct connections between applications, applications are connected to Master Data Management.

Fig - 10 depicts a typical data flow between CRM, ERP, and other Data Warehouses. The flow demonstrates that all these applications and data warehouses are connected with Boomi Master Data Hub. Any change in CRM, ERP, or DW data, gets loaded in Master Data Hub post data validation.

Build a centralized hub among applications to ensure your data is synchronized, accurate & up to date. Establish your golden record of data truth.

For example - As soon as a new customer record gets added or existing records get updated in Salesforce, the integration process between Salesforce and Master Data Hub pushes the salesforce changes to Master Data Hub. Master Data Hub verifies the data. If data is valid, it gets added or updated in Golden Records as soon as new changes are detected, integration processes between Master Data Hub, NetSuite, and Data Warehouses synchronize the new changes in these applications.

Order To Cash (A2A Use Case)

Master Data Synchronization (MDM Use Case)

Figure 9: Order to Cash Flow diagram between CRM & ERP

Figure 10: Master Data Hub Flow 11

Master Data Solution provides organizations flexible data management while retaining a single source of truth. It helps in:

To build an optimized, resilient supply chain, an Integrated EDI ecosystem is necessary. How effectively distributors, manufacturers, retailers, third-party logistics providers, e-commerce merchants, healthcare organizations, and others manage electronic data interchange (EDI) has a significant impact on business performance. A seamless EDI-driven supply chain lays a foundation for cost-efficient growth. Yet, many organizations struggle with needless complexity in EDI systems or rely on manual approaches that inhibit growth. Building a connected partner ecosystem should be one of the top priority tasks for every organization with low or high suppliers' dependencies. You should have built-in agility, which will help ensure that the supply chain can respond to changes in demand during the disruption, and adaptability, which will help you, change or onboard new partners easily to accommodate a disruption.

Fig - 11 depicts a typical EDI integration development flow. If we look at traditional EDI integration, Flowchart shows a typical EDI flow where BSA (Business System Analyst) reviews the documents with Partners and shares them with the Development team. The developer sets up the trading partner with a necessary channel like SFTP, AS2, etc.

The mapping document is reviewed and created by BSA; Business rules are defined as part of specs. The Developer sets up profile, maps source to EDI profile, adds business rules in the process and generates the EDI document. Then SIT & UAT is performed, and BSA shares the results with Partners. Partner reviews the results and provides sign-off to BSA. The whole process needs good coordination between Partner, BSA, and Dev team.

Centralizing data quality

Real-time data synchronization

Data stewardship

Data governance

Comprehensive analytics and much more

Edi And Supply Chain Automation (B2B/EDI Use Case)

Figure 11: A Typical EDI Integration Development Flow

12

Best PracticesThis section will discuss some of the best practices of implementing a robust integration solution. The Best Practices are divided into 6 areas:

Build a discovery documents to capture the list of interfaces, note down all the end-points for each of the interfaces, detail all of the interfaces' functions, and classify its complexity such as low, medium, and high.

Don't hesitate to ask the Business and IT users plenty of questions to understand the current landscape and architecture.

Group the interfaces into functional areas based on business impacts. It will help in setting up the priority of the use cases.

Lay out the Data Profile and Data Mapping for key interfaces and define business rules that might be needed for data transformation.

In EDI use cases, make sure to note down each of the EDI transactions, such as purchase orders, invoices, etc., with communication structures and partner details.

The Strategic Assessment output should be a well-defined integration register, high-level data flow, and data mapping.

Before any real development, it is critical to ensure that requirements are appropriately laid out and understood.

Strategic Assessment

Foundation

Execution Methodology

Build-n-Test

Deploy and Maintenance

Monitoring and Continuous Improvements

Strategic Assessment

Go through every interface and group them based on the integration patterns such as Point-to-Point, Publish/Subscribe, API/Web Services, ETL (Extract, Transformation, Load).

Identify the integration methods such as real-time, event-based, batch, ELT, asynchronous processes, and more.

Identify the security needs such as data masking for personal information, social security number, etc., API authentications, define user roles and accesses

Define common design patterns and reusable components such as error routine, reprocessing, exception notifications, cross-references, look-ups, etc.).

Evaluate the need and install iPaaS run-agents. In the case of Boomi, you should evaluate if you need an atom or molecule in the cloud or on-premise based on the use cases, data volume, security, and availability needs.

In the case of EDI use cases, make sure to consider partner onboarding processes and validation techniques in your architecture and design

Define dashboards and reports layouts for integration execution logs, error reporting, and process statistics such as number of input records, number of processed records, number of failed records, and so-on.

Always try to leverage reusable components rather than building again and again.

The goal of this stage is to come up with high-level architecture and ground-rules of implementation

Foundation

13

Go Iterative: Iterative execution plan is one of the best-suited methodologies for integration implementations. Instead of building all integrations once and then start testing and deployment, it is always good to build MVP in iteration and deploy as soon as possible. It will help the organization realize the value out of the investment sooner.

Go Hybrid: In the case of large implementations, where you are working with several teams and following a program plan rather than just a project plan, it is better to follow the hybrid model. In a hybrid model, you can have some phases as waterfall and some as iterative. For example, you can have requirements and design for all the interfaces before building and testing the interfaces iteratively.

Lay out the test plans and acceptance criteria Plan

Plan for demo and feedback from the stakeholder

Plan for User Acceptance Testing and Support

Things fall through the cracks, so always identify the risks, issues, and mitigation strategy

It is vital to follow a well-defined execution methodology with due focus on the MVP, speed, and time to value.

Execution Methodology

Monitor process statistics reports and dashboards regularly.

Evaluate if iPaaS upgrades have any impact. Follow the iPaaS instructions before the scheduled upgrades (if any).

Whether it's an underperforming or essential process to a new strategy, identify & name it.

Gather all information from start to end; steps, requirements, inputs, outputs, time duration, etc.

Analyze the gathered data and identify the bottlenecks & inefficiencies of the process.

Reengineer the whole process from start to end, increasing efficiency altogether.

Implement improvement on a smaller scale to check its efficiency compared to previous.

Monitor results before standardizing the process and before implementation on a larger scale.

Now, your integrations are up and running. It is essential to make sure integrations are up to date and improved as much as possible.

Monitoring And Continuous Improvement

Create a deployment tracker plan before the deployment. It should include the deployment of components based on dependencies. For example - If you are integrating CRM and ERP and have customized these applications and integration, you should first deploy application-level changes and then deploy integration.

Make sure the production environment is ready, and run-agents are properly set up before deployment Set up roles and access

Run sanity check after the deployment

Create an operational run book

Execute transition and knowledge transfer

This is the Go-Live moment and should be appropriately handled.

Deploy And Maintenance

Monitor process statistics reports and dashboards regularly.

Evaluate if iPaaS upgrades have any impact. Follow the iPaaS instructions before the scheduled upgrades (if any).

Whether it's an underperforming or essential process to a new strategy, identify & name it.

Gather all information from start to end; steps, requirements, inputs, outputs, time duration, etc.

Analyze the gathered data and identify the bottlenecks & inefficiencies of the process.

Reengineer the whole process from start to end, increasing efficiency altogether.

Implement improvement on a smaller scale to check its efficiency compared to previous.

Monitor results before standardizing the process and before implementation on a larger scale.

Now, your integrations are up and running. It is essential to make sure integrations are up to date and improved as much as possible.

Monitoring And Continuous Improvement

14

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