Integration

Data integration is a complicated discipline. There is no universal approach to data integration, and many of the techniques are still evolving. The goal of data integration is to gather data from different sources, combine it and present it in such a way that it appears to be a unified whole.

Supply chain management applications (for managing inventory and shipping), customer relationship management applications (for managing current and potential customers), business intelligence applications (for finding patterns from existing data from operations), and other types of applications (for managing data such as human resources data, health care, internal communications, etc) typically cannot communicate with one another in order to share data or business rules. For this reason, such applications are sometimes referred to as islands of automation or information silos. This lack of communication leads to inefficiencies, wherein identical data are stored in multiple locations, or straightforward processes are unable to be automated.

One large challenge is that the various systems that need to be linked together often reside on different operating systems, use different database solutions and different computer languages, and in some cases are legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor who originally created them.

Advantages and disadvantages of integration:

Advantages

  • Real time information access among systems
  • Streamlines business processes and helps raise organizational efficiency
  • Maintains information integrity across multiple systems
  • Ease of development and maintenance

Disadvantages

  • High initial development costs, especially for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)
  • Require a fair amount of up front business design, which many managers are not able to envision or not willing to invest in.

Bizztec was developed with third party integration in mind. It easily integrates to provide a seamless, real-time solution which is customized specifically for your business and/or industry. We are continually expanding our strategic software partner base in order to add to our comprehensive subscription based application offerings built around our world class accounting platform.