The 2019 State of Ecosystem and Application Integration Report indicates that your business could risk losing half a million dollars each year due to poor integration.
In today’s technology-driven world, it is impossible to run a business successfully using a single application. With dedicated apps managing particular aspects of your business, you are bound to have multiple applications.
However, managing and collaborating the different sets of data in these apps is a challenge, and that’s where an application integration solution comes to your rescue. It reduces the risk of data redundancy and duplication and enables a seamless flow of information across all your departments.
About Connectivity Studio
At To-Increase, we have been helping over 600 customers increase their business efficiency with Connectivity Studio. This versatile systems integration software solution helps you connect your ERP with all other business systems.
It is flexible and requires a simple configuration instead of the entire development—thus, empowering the businesses to perform integrations easily and independently. Functional users can start creating or updating interfaces on their own instead of always depending on a developer. In most of the cases, these users happen to know the business challenges with integrations, and can appropriately implement Connectivity Studio into a workable solution.
In this blog, I would like to talk about how the key functionalities of Connectivity Studio offer the top 4 benefits.
Connectivity Studio Benefits
Quick integration via form mapping
Creating an interface can be a challenging exercise for a functional user. The user knows the data that is being transferred as well as the meaning of the records and the field values.
However, there is Microsoft Dynamics 365 with thousands of tables and even more fields. How do you find the correct database field name? The user can point to the required fields on a form, but how does he or she identify that field name? This is where the form mapping function comes into play.
By knowing the input fields for the integration, the user will simply have to select the exact corresponding field on the form. And with that selection, the user has created the mapping.
Specified imports to multiple companies
Microsoft Dynamic 365 is capable of keeping different ledger accounts separately, based on legal entities (also called as companies) into one system.
Using separate companies also means maintaining separate data, which can be a challenge while carrying out integrations. For instance, in specific scenarios such as data migration or data synchronization, you would need to import data into more than one company at the same time.
Connectivity Studio has helped customers import data into more than 30 companies simultaneously and can help you too.
Okay, that is great, you say, but what about the company-specific values or local standards? For that function, we created a mapping specific to each company (with conditions applied). This lets you import data into a company, with all its defaults already set in place.
Flexible integrations
Data Management brings a lot of data entities that can be used for imports and exports. And, when a data entity is not entirely correct, Microsoft creates a new version. So, then, you have two entities—customer V1 and the new version, customer V2. How do you know which one is the right one for you to use?
Let’s say a new or updated functionality is added to the system. Then, development is required to update or create a new data entity; otherwise, data management can’t use those updates or created tables.
With Connectivity Studio, you do not face any such issue. Can it still use data entities? Yes, for sure, but it is far more capable—it helps you get data into the standard, custom tables, and views.
Any table or a combination of multiple tables can be used for integrations. For example, if you want to import into 10 or even 20 product related tables, our solution completely supports that.
Most importantly, the system will use business logic during the interfaces. That means value validations and defaults on selections will be done. For instance, when a sales order is imported automatically, payment terms and addresses are set and the customer account number field is updated.
Connectivity Studio also supports customizations to tables. Any new table and field will become available immediately after creation or modification—no extra development is required.
This makes the solution very flexible in selecting the data that can be imported or exported.
Manage multiple data scenarios, defaults, and transformations
Data that is imported or exported between systems can be stored differently in each system. In fact, sometimes, you may even see that the data field for storage is present in one system, but does not exist in the other. This is something that you need to take care of in your integrations, or they may simply fail. Other integration solutions expect the data presented to be accurate and are not capable of altering data during processing.
Connectivity Studio can do that for you. For each field mapping, you can set up constants, defaults, conversions, and transformations.
Constant value is used when a value is not in the system that it is imported from.
Default values are used in case a field doesn’t hold a value, but D365 really requires a value there.
Conversions are used to alter the layout of the data—both importing and exporting. For instance, they can be used to modify dates, amounts, texts, enums, and more.
Some example scenarios are:
- When exporting, a date needs to be in the YYYYMMDD format.
- The imported text value had a prefix for a product of ABC_, and this needs to removed
- The amount is shown in this format: 1.000,12. During import, D365 needs to identify the thousand separator and the decimal separator.
Transformations are used to change a value.
Some examples:
- USA needs to be transformed into the US when exporting a customer
- Product A1000 is transformed into B5124 when importing a sales line
- Custgroup 10 needs to be transformed to 20 when the ABC code holds the value B
Connectivity Studio for you
The benefits of the To-Increase Connectivity Studio mentioned above can help you create and maintain integrations easily in your business. It allows simple and easy configurations, which means no need to deal with the complex data modeling work. Consequently, you can gain significant insights into all integrations.
Connectivity Studio also adds flexibility to our other Business Integration Solution offerings: EDI Studio and Master Data Management. It consists of a variety of features that can help you meet your various integration needs.
Khalil Bouzidi
Jim Schwab
Kaustubh Durve
