Integration technologies allow organizations facilitate transactions, simplify interactions, and strengthen relationships across business ecosystems. They play an elementary role in streamlining B2B processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, etc., moving data between applications, onboarding customer faster, and growing revenue through e-commerce and marketplace channels. This is precisely why enterprises must have confidence in their integration strategy, technology, as well as vendor partners.
So, are you ready to understand the importance of developing integration confidence? While we’re at it, we must explore what exactly is integration confidence.
Build Integration Confidence
When you know that you can deliver maximum business outcomes to lead the pack, you have full confidence in your integration approach. Although “integration confidence” is not a measurable metric, it’s the resulting assurance you receive from having the right kind of solution for simplifying integration flows.
Organizations can gain integration confidence by implementing the right integration technology and having access to the right mix of skills and resources.
Confidence comes when your enterprises can respond proactively to ever-changing market changes impacting supply chain ecosystems. It develops when your integration solution can safeguard file use cases, meet strict SLAs from respective partners or customers, simplify EDI along with API-based integrations, etc.
Though building integration confidence is essential, it’s not a one-day affair. One needs to bear several points in mind, such as:
1. Freedom of Choice
Choices are necessary. A flexible business strategy should provide you with the option to design and deploy B2B integrations yourself, outsource to an external team, or morph a blended approach leveraging both. Choosing the right integration approach directly impacts time-to-market and total cost of ownership (TCO).
2. Credibility Power
To establish a strong relationship with a trading partner or customers, you require credibility. One needs full credibility to keep trust in increasing market opportunities, accelerating customer retention, and increasing time-to-value. Though achieving credibility is easy, it calls for a reputable vendor with a mix of services and technology.
3. Value Real-time Insights
The business world has moved way past data. Now, one needs access to real-time insights that can empower your decision making and increase value. For this, enterprises need to unify integrations into a single platform and use incoming data effectively.
4. Set the Controls
Organizations must have proper control over their integration systems to reap maximum dividends. In doing so, companies need control over a set of aspects to determine how to:
- Administer operational tasks
- Provide user access to pertinent integration information
- Create powerful strategies (to expand or shorten your teams)
5. Employ a Complete Technology Platform
When you employ a complete technological solution, chances of delivering better business value mitigating risks, and eliminating silos increase. A centralized system helps you design, analyze, and optimize workflows and B2B integration flows for driving the business forward. Whether your team needs to find the best eCommerce website builder or a design tool, or deliver strategic tasks, it all needs good management. Reporting turns easier, resolution of issues become faster, and assessing business health becomes more intuitive.
In short, organizations looking for gaining integration confidence need to rely on a complete integration platform.
6. Have End-To-End Visibility over Integration Workflows
Gaining access to insights in real-time and a unified integration technology platform are not enough to drive the confidence you need. Enterprises need to have end-to-end visibility and not partial visibility. This is because poor workflow visibility can compel organizations miss SLAs or cause higher issue resolution times.
Enterprises must invest in modern integration platforms to create true end-to-end visibility across any business process and eliminate the blind spots by connecting cloud environments with legacy ones.
Set Path for Future
Make use of ways mentioned above to build integration confidence and gain a competitive edge. As we move ahead, relying on legacy technologies and strategies can cost you your business growth. Simply put, to stay ahead of the game, you need to use a robust integration platform to boost confidence in your business.