Business Process Integration - Integration - Update 44 - Help - Hexagon

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Application integration on its own takes no account of the business process involved – application integration can be set up, the user can push the “integration” button and data flows from application A to application B. It can be executed in a point-to-point fashion. This works fine if one of the following apply:

  • There are only two applications involved.

  • Integration occurs in a small workgroup where interpersonal communication is good.

  • Milestones between disciplines can be aligned for the exchange to occur.

But a business process integration is normally required when one of the following occurs:

The user has to interact with the data externally to their working application to decide what to accept or reject. This would be a negotiated transaction – engineers want to be notified of change, but may decide not to accept for many reasons.

  • The projects extend beyond a workgroup (enterprise or extended-enterprise).

  • Milestones between disciplines or partners do not neatly align. For example, engineering is not a real-time activity.

  • There has to be some control, distribution, notification and management of the integration.

This requires an electronic workflow execution, involving the actions to notify, store, deliver, consume and move on.

Therefore, you need to establish business process integration when you:

  • Cannot determine or predict the synchronicity of processes, exchanges and tasks between business functions

  • Need to control the flow of the data between these functions and understand progress

  • Need to notify and warn of change, but allow the process to continue unabated

For this to be successful, not only are data integration and application integration required, but you also require:

  • Modeling and execution of the workflow processes between disparate business functions

  • Identifying the timing and scope of the handover/exchange tasks

  • Interjecting into the application itself or providing a notification mechanism to warn the user of potential change

  • Storing the change until the user is ready to receive and absorb the change (an information messaging bus for real-time data exchange is a distinct liability here)

  • Delivering the change (after applying data and application integration, of course).

Optionally, you could enable the user to choose what to retrieve now, what to retrieve at a later date, and what to reject. This may sound like a lot of effort, but it is necessary to provide true concurrency of project execution tasks without the anarchy of data changing “under the feet” of the end-user (a recipe for disaster).