Enterprise Integration
Thanks to the never-ending quest for operational efficiencies and competitive advantages, applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) environments have become common in virtually every industry today.
Increasingly,organizations are now finding that surviving the complicated and often painful implementation process is only half the battle. In order to realize their investment's true value, their enterprise applications must be extended throughout their organization.
Our agile programming approach is built from the ground up to help your organization unlock the productivity, performance, and efficiencies hidden deep within your enterprise applications.
ERP systems offer your organization unprecedented power because they centralize the essential functionalities that virtually every business requires to operate—including Finance, HR, Sales & Marketing, Inventory, etc.
Because each organization is different, ERP systems never fit "right out of the box," unfortunately. They often require massive amounts of training and customization before they're properly configured to bring value to an organization. For this reason, ERP systems often represent the chief source of IT pain in any organization.
That's where Process Pathways comes in. Our agile programming approach is built from the ground up to give your organization the help it needs to unlock the productivity, performance, and other operational efficiencies hidden deep within your enterprise applications.
Eliminating Bottlenecks
In
an ideal world, information flows effortlessly throughout your organization,
pausing only to ensure that the necessary actions required at each
step are completed. In the real world, however, that's rarely the
case.
Instead, because organizations are typically made up of a variety of disparate systems that do not communicate seamlessly, bottlenecks can appear, requiring human intervention, often in the form of unnecessary decision making or redundant data entry. By specializing in workflow automation, however, Process Pathways can virtually eliminate these inefficiencies. Instead of struggling with workflow management, your organization's information systems no longer hold your organization back. Instead of creating delays or unnecessary work, they're better able to support the work your organizationreally does—profitably and efficiently.
Case Study
Bottleneck: Manual Invoice Receiving and Data Entry Process on ERP System
The University of Calgary's Materials Management department wanted to streamline the way their vendors submit invoices.
The Old Way: Redundant Data Entry
Invoices from the vendors and suppliers would arrive in the university's accounts payable department for processing. Invoice information was again entered, causing redundant work and, potentially, introducing errors into the system. This process was slowing down the payments to vendors and also it required one full-time employee to validate the invoices against purchase orders.
The New Way: Vendor Portal
Process Pathways was engaged to create and roll out the new Vendor Portal, which allows vendors to submit invoices electronically. The system automatically validates the invoice against the purchase order to verify the quantity of goods, amount of each item and the total amount. Once the invoice passes the validation process, it automatically entered on the ERP system Accounts Payable module. The Vendor Portal also displayed the status of the invoice to the vendor by retrieving the status data from ERP system.
Seamless Access to Information
Thanks in large part to expectations set by email's near-instantaneous communication capabilities, your customers and suppliers have come to expect each of your organization's employees to have instant access to the information they'll need to make accurate, real-time decisions. Typically, however, that information is locked in various information systems spread across your organization.
Now, thanks to ERP, access to your organization's information can be extended, seamlessly and securely, all the way out to the furthest reaches of your organization.
Question
What can Enterprise Integration do for me?
- Data (information) Integration: ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as Enterprise Information Integration.
- Process Integration: linking business processes across applications.
- Vendor Independence: extracting business policies or rules from applications and implementing them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.
- Common Front-End: An EAI system could front-end a whole cluster of applications, providing a single, consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to interact with different applications
