Systems integration is a technique streamlined toward the successful expansion of your business

In a rapidly evolving corporate environment, an increasing number of businesses are altering the manner in which they operate. From logistics to manufacturing, more and more businesses are finding ways to streamline themselves in the quest to improve their overall bottom line.

In the past decade, systems integration has become a key factor in the operations, strategy and competitive advantage of major corporations. Prior to this, the practice was confined to technical and operational tasks; however, with the global market of today, it has become a strategic task that diffuses business management – not only at the technical level, but also at management and strategic levels.

Effective systems integration has had fundamental implications on the capabilities of firms and changed the business landscape. The process itself involves making contrasting systems work together in a dynamic way in order to support new and innovative enterprise-level business processes.

Until now, ensuring systems work hand in hand to improve corporate effectiveness has proven to be both expensive and time-consuming, with system integration activities often costing significantly more than standard application development.

Until recently, on a business level the process has been challenging, in that traditional integration activities had not naturally supported the rapid assembly of innovative processes. In response, a number of businesses and technology providers are taking advantage of a service-oriented approach toward integrating systems, both within and across corporate enterprises. This attempts to combine business activities and services in a manner that allows increased flexibility in the development of innovative business processes.

There are a number of benefits to incorporating this integration:

When information systems with related functions are integrated, the existing business processes will be altered.

Current processes, and with it shortfalls, will be critically analysed and radically redesigned to achieve improvements in performance measures.

As an example, one need only look at models of successful businesses to gauge how this measure would be most effective.

As departments operate independently of each other, multiple processes are often repeated – resulting in duplicated and inconsistent data.

Through the implementation of systems integration, detailed data capture and validation is able to be carried out across all departments. As a result, if workflows are critically analysed and re-engineered, there will be a marked improvement in processing time, efficiencies and end-user satisfaction.

Employees are beginning to feel the effects of this. Through the implementation of integration, working procedures are being revised, streamlined and processes improved. This has resulted in a reduction in the monotony and pointless steps or procedures affecting the morale of employees in today’s workplace.

The extent to which this is occurring is subjective; however, the fact remains that with this streamlining, employees are experiencing change, and with that an ability to adapt to a new and challenging working environment.

From a stakeholder perspective, this has been long overdue. The advantages to implementing this could see the bottom line of an investment taking a knock initially; however, the return will more than make up for this in the longer term. It is essential, however, that all stakeholders are on the same level when implementing the practice.

The fundamental basis of systems integration is an amalgamation of separate entities to create a more complex and efficient business model. In order for this to occur, all stakeholders need to be made aware of the effectiveness and intricacies of the process, as well as be a willing participant in its implementation.

The benefit of systems integration is clear to all. Ultimately, and if implemented effectively, the practice will lead to customer satisfaction, increases in cross-selling, improved product feedback as well as a boost in overall productivity.

It seems the case for integration is not so much a case of whether a company can afford to implement it, but rather how it can afford not to.

Adam Currie