Digital solutions help businesses meet the demands of a more online economy, enabling increased efficiencies and growth opportunities. But this growth is only possible when those solutions have access to the most current and accurate data.
What is Business Process Integration?
Business process integration (BPI) connects data, applications, and people across your organization. These integrations enable more responsive and efficient interactions with vendors, customers, and business partners.
Let’s explore how BPI can improve your business outcomes during this era of accelerated digital transformation.
The Advancement of Digital Transformation
New technologies roll out every quarter, offering improved functions and processes for businesses across all sectors. In response to market demands, industries are onboarding these solutions to manage tasks like inventory tracking, billing execution and payment processing, and automating repetitive tasks.
This change is known as digital transformation. It’s adopting the most current digital tools and processes to enable more efficient workflows and eliminate busy work.
Digital transformation empowers people to focus on the things that matter most – connecting with clients, developing innovative solutions, and delivering optimized results.
The Role of Data in Digital Transformation
Data is critical to unlocking the full potential of each technology you onboard during your digital transformation.
It’s vital to break down data silos within your organization. When data flow is hampered or controlled by individual business units, errors are bound to occur.
Common issues faced by organizations with siloed data include:
- Inconsistent data across departments. When client profiles are separately maintained by multiple departments and shared manually, the likelihood of inaccuracies increases.
- Lack of client insight. Relationships are central to doing business in this digital age. If departments don’t share information about changes to client personnel, business goals, or other critical updates, it leaves members of your organization without the knowledge they need to serve clients best.
- Faulty forecasting. Forecasting is a data-centered science. Without accurate numbers to work with, forecasts are unreliable.
Freeing up your data to seamlessly flow between departments and across functions leads to better data integrity for your whole organization.
Benefits of Business Process Integration
Business process integration is about more than just connecting data. It involves streamlining the flow of information to optimize your operations.
These are a few benefits of BPI.
Better Data Quality
Organizations lose, on average, $12.9 million annually due to poor data quality. As discussed previously, data integrity has much to do with the accessibility and integration of that data.
BPI allows for data integration across all departments, platforms, and functions, which organically improves data quality with tools like Boomi DataHub to centralize data governance and create a single source of truth.
Improved Efficiency
When you consider that the volume of data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is fast approaching more than 100 zettabytes, managing your organization’s data flow becomes a priority.
If your workforce is switching between apps or contacting other departments to hunt down the most current data, your company is throwing money at inefficiencies.
BPI enables workers across your organization to access the data they need when they need it, so they can put that data to use.
Time-Saving Automation
Every organization has a certain number of repetitive tasks while doing business. But many of these tasks don’t have to be completed by humans.
Customer intake, order processing, and data searches are prime candidates for automation. When your CRM and logistics software are connected, it is easy to set up routine tasks like sending out shipping notices.
Types of Business Process Integrations
Business process integration is typically accomplished in one of three ways:
- Native integration. Software applications are linked to allow a seamless flow of data. Native integrations are already part of these applications so they are easy to set up. Typically, native integration only requires changing a setting that allows communication between applications.
- API integrations. These enable data sharing between two or more applications through their application programming interfaces (APIs). Implementation of APIs often requires developer involvement.
- Third-party integrations. These integrations are managed by an external platform that hosts the connection between applications. A benefit of a third-party integration is that the platform manages any updates and security patches that may impact existing integrations.
Business Process Integration With Boomi iPaaS
Optimizing your digital transformation through business process integration requires the right tool.
As the leader in cloud-based integration solutions, Boomi offers business process integration that is fast, agile, and more cost-effective than managing native or API integrations internally.
Want to learn more about business process integration in action? Download “Modern ERPs Allow Organizations to Integrate and Accelerate.”