Systems Integration
Modern businesses rely on systems that perform specific functions. These systems often operate in silos. Systems integration involves connecting these systems so they can communicate with each other and synchronise data automatically. Integrating your systems can significantly improve your customer’s experience and also increase productivity.
Why integrate your systems?
There are two main benefits to integrating your systems:
- Improved customer experience: Your customer has different touch points with your business that may span different departments and therefore systems. From the customer’s viewpoint, all touch points should be consistent and have the same data about them.
- Improved productivity: Systems integration can lead to significant improvements in efficiency and productivity. In siloed systems, employees refer to customer information in different systems. This not only has a productivity impact, but also results in poor customer experience.
Systems integration increases financial performance
These benefits should translate to improved financial performance.
Improved customer experience increases revenue by:
- Decreasing your customer churn rate because you are providing a better service.
- Increasing customer’s lifetime value because of repeat purchases from your business.
Improving efficiency and productivity increases your profit by:
- Servicing your customer or producing your product becomes more efficient. This reduces the cost of servicing your customer or the cost of production.
As with all capital expenditure, a business case validates whether the systems integration project is viable. We can help define a business case to quantify these benefits. Our approach is deliver a return on investment early using an agile delivery methodology.
Agile systems integration
Following an agile systems integration methodology allows us to deliver ROI early in the project.
Here is an overview of our methodology:
Scoping
Outline the current state
This will provide a high level overview of the current state of application architecture and the level of integration.
Specify the desired state
The desired state will give an overview of how the systems should be integrated. It outlines the main business processes and how they will be integrated. Each business process has a high level cost that is used in the business case.
Each iteration has the following phases
As stated above, we follow an agile process that delivers return on investment as soon as possible.
Each phase implements a subset of the business processes and associated integration points. The functionality included in each iteration is driven by return on investment.
Business Case
Each iteration will have a separate business case. Many believe that a business case has to be lengthy document but we don’t adhere to this philosophy. It will be a brief document that focuses on the anticipated return on investment.
Detailed Design
We complete a granular design of how the integration will be implemented. This also allows us to refine the estimate used in the initial business case. If the ROI is still acceptable, we proceed to the next step.
Development and implementation
Only the selected business processes for this iteration will be implemented.
Using technologies that cater for systems integration significantly reduces time, risk and cost.
User acceptance testing
User acceptance testing ensures that the systems integration is performing as anticipated.
Quality assurance is done in a separate testing environment. This ensures there are no adverse impacts in your production systems.
Systems Training
Your internal training staff can perform systems training or we can conduct the training for you.
Deployment into production
After the system integration is tested, it is deployed into production. We then monitor the system and resolve any issues that arise.
Planning for the next iteration
After the systems are stable, planning for the next iteration will commence.
Contact us for a FREE 30 minute strategy session
Systems integration is an important component of our custom software development service.
Contact us for a FREE strategy session. We’ll show you how to improve the financial performance of your business with systems integration.