By Boomi Aditya Pavan Guddati Preeti Lobo
Apps Associates, a Boomi Elite SI Partner, is an enterprise application and data services leader with more than two decades of experience helping organizations innovate through digital transformation initiatives. As part of the company’s business integration and automation practice, Apps Associates has specialists who work with customers to select and implement appropriate middleware tools and platforms.
This blog is the first of a three-part series designed to highlight the value of modernizing your middleware with the Boomi AtomSphere Platform. It will explore how Boomi can deliver seamless integration between ERP applications, best-of-breed human capital management (HCM) applications such as Workday, and third-party logistics (3PL) solutions like ICS and Arvato.
Why Does Middleware Matter for Today’s Businesses?
Middleware is especially important today because many organizations are migrating workloads to the cloud — and with that migration goes business critical data.
When companies were primarily invested in on-premises applications, they were often integrated with hard-coded, point-to-point integrations. That was fine with a limited number of source and target systems. But as the number of individual, tightly connected systems grew, their integrations became a nightmare to manage and maintain. The connections were brittle; with even minor changes, they broke.
An early middleware solution to this was the enterprise service bus (ESB). But ESB is an on-premises software architecture model, usually employing technology common before the cloud. It cannot handle hybrid environments that contain on-premises applications, including older legacy systems, as well as cloud workloads.
Enter iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service)
The advent of iPaaS provides organizations with more flexible, loosely-coupled source and target data transfer options whether on-premises to on-premises, on-premises to cloud, or cloud to cloud. Boomi’s iPaaS, the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, offers low-code integration development, which doesn’t require a team of developers to build an integration and take it to market. Though some complex integrations may require additional coding, many can be handled by non-technical personnel through the platform’s drag-and-drop interface.
Streamlined and Accurate Data Exchange at the Speed of Business
As businesses rely more and more on data-driven decision making to guide operations, the importance of timely, accurate information increases. If a purchase order, invoice, shipping update, or new customer is entered in one system, there are undoubtedly other systems that need that information as well.
Manually rekeying the data is slow and dramatically increases the possibility of mistakes. Waiting for an overnight batch process to run also introduces delays. And, if a process fails to complete or poorly mapped data transformations result in errors between source and target, more time is wasted. Eliminating those issues or knowing about them and being able to address them in real time if they occur is the purpose of a modern integration platform.
Using Boomi to Integrate Cloud ERP Applications With Other Best-of-Breed Applications
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications do the heavy lifting of business operations. They provide a central place to execute multiple business functions, such as supply chain management, inventory, finance, HCM, procurement, and business performance monitoring. Although we’re well past the days when most businesses relied on single on-premises ERP applications such as SAP or Oracle to handle all these tasks, ERP systems are still looked on as the single source of truth in terms of data completeness, quality, and accuracy.
With the rise of much leaner, cloud-based ERP systems, many components of legacy ERP applications were parceled out to best-of-breed applications. The responsibility for getting fast and accurate information to and from ERP systems and third-party applications fell to middleware — or less effectively and with greater complexity, to point-to-point integrations.
Let’s take a look how Apps Associates used the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to simplify and accelerate integration with Oracle Cloud ERP for a leading life sciences company.
The Integration Development Approach for an Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation
Oracle Cloud ERP exposes web services for all data objects that integrate with external systems. Apps Associates identified the web services needed for loading the necessary data objects by analyzing business use cases and required fields to be mapped. Then they tested it using Postman and SOAP UIs to establish working payloads to create and/or update the data objects within the scope of the implementation.
Oracle Cloud also provides file-based import (FBDI) for bulk data processing. Apps Associates determines the correct approach for each client based on the volume of records for each integration.
For outbound integrations, Oracle provides standard web services to query data across all modules. In addition, Oracle also offers the Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) tool, which is a SQL-based report that can be executed using a SOAP API and returns data in XML or CSV formats. Common data objects could be customers, employees, items, sales orders and accounts receivable (AR) invoices.
Mapping the integrations
Before building any integrations, Apps Associates conducts extensive sessions with the client’s business users to map the data flows between source and target systems for the required integrations, which in this case included AR transactions, inventory updates, and Workday demographics. The team also gathers and validates the business rules governing each integration and documents them in the technical specifications document.
Building and testing
Apps Associates built Boomi processes that modeled “happy path” scenarios (no exception or error conditions) and tested them with business users and functional leads before expanding the processes to all use cases and test scripts defined for the integrations.
The team then expanded the Boomi processes to include error handling and email notifications and subjected the integrations to rigorous test cycles before UAT and production deployment.
Key integration features of the Boomi platform
Apps Associates used many of the platform’s capabilities to design and build the client’s integrations, including:
- Pre-built Boomi connectors for Salesforce, HTTP client, and SFTP
- Data Process Shape to decode base64 data and process XML
- Message Shape to combine all responses from one web service triggered multiple times, using the “combine documents into single message” feature
- Document Property when multiple documents are available in the source
- Document Cache Shape and provide Unique Index to retrieve data when required
- Groovy script and user defined functions to calculate rebate and sales allowance amount based on country
- Split components into multiple documents based on currency code and trigger sub-processes once for every currency code
Integration Solutions Solve Business Problems
Through integration via the Boomi platform, the client was able to:
- Standardize business processes and eliminate customizations
- Simplify the financial close process and expedite financial reporting
- Eliminate legacy/at risk, end-of-life systems
Be sure to check back for the second blog in our series, which will focus on using the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to integrate the Sage Intacct cloud computing financial application with Microsoft Azure.
Learn more about Apps Associates here.