If you’re an integration specialist in today’s business world, you’re, quite often, been asked to do more with less.
Possibly your organization has discovered it needs to transform its product strategy or supply chains, and you are investing hours to write code that makes those changes possible. Or perhaps your team set the minds on making improvements to existing applications and integrations in order to improve efficiency and make savings.
In either case, if you’re working with legacy middleware, your role as an integration developer become more challenging. The strain you’ll experience while leveraging legacy solutions and techniques will have a direct impact on your company’s ease of doing business and ability to drive value.
We’ve come up with three major challenges that integration specialists are experiencing with legacy solutions.
Challenge 1: So Many Interfaces and So Many Tools
One of the main reasons behind this challenge is that vendors take a hodgepodge approach to development.
Let’s suppose you’re working with a legacy solution that had its glory days of data integration. When your data isn’t too big or complex to manage, legacy solutions are enough indeed. But, with the big data revolution, relying on these solutions to create data connections and integrate new customers can become counterproductive. A lot of hand-coding is required, thus introducing delays and inaccuracies.
Related White Paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
If you’re facing such complexities, reimagined data integration solutions are what you need. These tools can enable business users to integrate and manage complex, bi-directional data streams with speed and ease.
Reimagined solutions would make life easier by offering one set of interfaces so that whether you’re creating data connections, building automated workflows, extending the EDI network, you’re working with a unified platform.
Challenge 2: The Responsibility of All Data-Driven Operations is Overwhelming
If you’re a data integration specialist that uses a legacy solution, it’s obvious that you invest a lot of time (weeks or months) in managing data-driven operations like data boarding, data integration, exception handling, data security, and more. While you spend so much time creating partner connections, mostly manually, you will feel burdened.
By reimagining the way you integrate and use data through self-service, AI, and automation, you can reduce the burden – while allowing the operations to produce results that are more authentic and faster than ever.
Challenge 3: EDI Technology That Isn’t Integrated with Your Solution
When you have multiple supply chains or a big partner network, you must also have an EDI platform that plays a central role in onboarding partners and managing transactions. Chances are that technology is entirely separate from the legacy solutions you’re using to connect applications for logistics, finance, and HR. This means you’ve more set of tools as well as interfaces to learn, and you must coordinate and integrate data from different systems.
Using reimagined solutions that support EDI and B2B networks play an important role here. After all, EDI transactions will impact other applications. Once a partner places an order, their finance and ERP systems will take notice. Without a doubt, business transactions across departments and teams. Surely, adopting an integration platform that reaches everywhere your transaction goes is an answer to all problems.