Benefits of Salesforce Integration with Business Apps

Benefits of Salesforce Integration with Business Apps

by | | Data Integration, dataZap

The Salesforce ecosystem is one way to instantly transform your business. Once you have team members trained on the ins and outs of Salesforce’s various systems, your company will be more flexible and efficient than ever before.

One of the key pieces of Salesforce is integration. But before we can dive into the benefits of Salesforce integration with business apps, we must first discuss APIs and provide an explanation of Salesforce integration.

What Is Salesforce Integration?

Whenever you bring two or more systems together in the Salesforce ecosystem, you are performing an integration task. The main goal of integration is to streamline different processes by combining them and removing all the unnecessary parts.

Regarding your business, consider applications and systems that require one another to complete a task. For instance, you may have one system that holds your data and another that needs the data to perform analyses and provide results. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you didn’t have to access two separate systems to get the required result? That’s where integration comes in.

Application Programming Interfaces

An application programming interface, or API, is the method through which two applications communicate. You utilize APIs every day without ever realizing it—that’s because the APIs are so well-integrated into your devices. Whenever you fire up an app on your phone that accesses the internet and presents information from a server, APIs facilitate this effortless transfer of data.

Thus, it is through APIs that Salesforce integration is possible.

Salesforce Integration Architectures

Salesforce integration is a well-trodden path, meaning you’ll have several options available when the time comes to integrate. It’s essential to understand the integration architectures at your disposal before undertaking an integration task since each comes with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Hub-and-Spoke Integration

To visualize hub-and-spoke integration, think of a wagon wheel. In the center of the wheel, you have the hub—an area where all the spokes collect. In this case, the hub acts as a centralized system that is the means of communication between all the connected systems.

Those connected systems are like the spokes of a wheel—they all connect through the hub, but they don’t directly touch each other. While this means you only need to build a single connection from each system to the hub, there’s something to be said for direct connections between systems.

Point-to-Point Integration

Point-to-point integration removes the hub from the equation—all that matters are the various systems and their interconnectivity. This certainly creates a tricky task for your business’s integration builders and maintenance workers. When you add a new point to the integration, time must be spent connecting that point to all the applicable systems.

In a real-world scenario, this could look like shipping, tracking, and billing systems. Billing needs to connect to shipping, which then needs to connect to tracking. However, if there’s a need for billing and tracking to connect, your team will need to build another integration. The work can pile up quickly, and this system is not ideal for interchangeability.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Integration

Enterprise service bus, or ESB, integration takes the hub-and-spoke model to the next level. The center point of an ESB system can facilitate processes between systems like routing, orchestration, transformation, and security. All your systems connect to the bus with easy-to-disconnect plugs, allowing for scalable integration over time. With ESB integration:

  • Routing can easily transport messages from one system to another;
  • Orchestration allows you to put transactions in a specific order;
  • Transformation lets you translate messages into other system languages prior to routing; and
  • Security can perform authorization and authentication checks before messages enter your systems.

Increased Productivity

Now, consider the benefits of Salesforce integration, starting with increased productivity. This goes back to streamlining your systems. Why make your employees access multiple systems separately when putting those systems together saves time and energy?

While toggling between two systems doesn’t take all the time in the world, imagine how much time employees can save in a week—or a month!—by utilizing an integrated system.

Effective Decision Making

Accurate data and effective decision-making are directly connected. If it takes a long time to get data in front of you, or if the data you look at isn’t spot-on, you might find yourself making questionable decisions. Integration makes it easier for you to review accurate data and make informed decisions.

Automated Workflow

Repetitive tasks are things of the past when you use Salesforce integration. With click workflow automation, Salesforce can bring business apps and systems together to accomplish busy work that employees don’t want or need to do. Automating workflows makes processes happen more quickly while also bolstering the morale of your team members. After all, no one wants to do menial labor for hours on end.

Deepened Customer Connections

Customers expect more now than ever before; they want businesses to cater to them personally, and integration makes this possible. The key to strong customer connections is understanding who your buyers and users are. A system that can easily look over data from several sources gives you a complete picture of your customer base. From this point, you can quickly determine the various pain points and needs of all your customers.

When you make deeper connections, you increase your business’s customer retention. You may find it easy to bring customers in, but keeping them is the trick. Integration helps you tailor your systems to your customers so they’ll want to stick with you for the long haul.

Better Online Sales

Ease of use is a big factor for customers. Salesforce integration is all about making things easier, and that extends to your business’s online sales platforms. Customers are more inclined to purchase when you make buying easy.

All these benefits come part and parcel with Salesforce data integration. Salesforce is a system designed to be exceptionally useful no matter what you’re using it for, so you can customize it to your every need.

Now that you know these benefits of Salesforce integration with business apps, make Salesforce a powerful tool in your kit. With so many unique systems that work together to produce effective results, Salesforce is an instrument you can’t afford to miss.

3 Benefits of Migrating Your Data to SAP

3 Benefits of Migrating Your Data to SAP

by | | Data Migration, dataZap, SAP Data Migration

Switching your business to SAP HANA is an ever-growing advantage in today’s digital ecosystem. While SAP HANA is a database by classification, it’s much more than simply a place to store your data. It’s better to think of it as a data platform—a system through which you can store and process data to use it to its full potential. Read on to discover three benefits of migrating your data to SAP.

Real-Time Analytics

How long do your reports take to process? If your current reports require hours to show up on your desk, SAP HANA will completely change the game. Even basic SAP HANA setups can process data around ten times faster than non-SAP setups. Just think of how much less time you’ll need to spend waiting around!

When data comes in quickly, it allows you to make business decisions in a flash. This can make a huge difference in your company’s success.

Ability To Tackle Big Data

Data is getting bigger, and it shows no signs of stopping. Big data is “big” because of the three v’s: volume, velocity, and variety. If your system can’t handle all these factors, you won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of working with big data. The more data you have access to, the more insights you can gain.

Exceptional Scalability

No business has reached soaring heights by staying static—you need to have a system that grows with you to facilitate consistent progress. As you gain more data, the last thing you need is to have your system tell you that “it’s too much!” SAP HANA’s largest certified configuration has a whopping 168TB of RAM. Need we say more?

When you need SAP data migration tools, come to ChainSys. We can supply you with everything you need.

Now that you understand these three benefits of migrating your data to SAP, you can begin your company’s transition into the cloud. Be a driving force of change in your industry and show others how things can change for the better.

How an SAP System Can Benefit Your Business

How an SAP System Can Benefit Your Business

by | | Data Migration, dataZap, SAP Data Migration

Systems Applications and Products (SAP) systems are perhaps the best-known software in the business world, and for good reason. SAP products prioritize usability and overarching solutions, making them ideal for anyone looking for a high-level overhaul of their management systems. Companies in the process of rapid growth stand to gain a lot from SAP systems—read on to learn how an SAP system can benefit your business.

What Is Systems Applications and Products?

SAP is software that focuses on robust business management with a primary concentration on data utilization. SAP software is a type of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, which you can think of as a kind of hub for all your business processes. Everything from analytics to human resources to finance can run from an SAP system, promoting communication and collaboration throughout departments.

Business Growth

When a business grows, data becomes more difficult to manage. This makes perfect sense—your current systems are designed to hold a certain amount of data, and you’ll reach that threshold if you continue to excel.

SAP systems are designed to calculate datasets of vastly varying sizes, meaning your system will scale with your business as it grows.

Increased Efficiency

Repetition is the death of expansion. When you have employees struggling through busy work that a computer can handle, you miss out on opportunities for high productivity. An SAP system takes this load off employees’ shoulders and frees them up to put their minds where they are needed.

More Transparency

A single database is ideal for efficiency, but also for transparency. Data accuracy allows you to provide faster results, as well as results that have gone through a thorough evaluation. Data is easily corruptible, but an SAP system lets you monitor your information every step of the way.

Now that you understand how an SAP system can benefit your business, don’t hesitate to learn more about SAP data migration. Migration projects can feel like a large undertaking, but with a competent team guiding you through it, you’ll have your data where it needs to be in a flash.

3 Benefits of Data Integration for Your Business

3 Benefits of Data Integration for Your Business

by | | Data Integration, dataZap

Data integration is an ever-growing market, but it seems like the number of companies that aren’t familiar with data integration is growing, too. Allow us to explain what data integration is and why it’s good for your company—keep reading to discover three benefits of data integration for your business.

What Is Data Integration?

First, you should understand the basics of data integration. At its simplest, data integration is a process that takes data from various sources and combines everything into one unified set. This has applications both analytically and operationally, which allows you to be more effective in several avenues.

The tricky thing about data is that it’s an ever-evolving form of information. Without a way to bring disparate pieces under one roof, the data your company sifts through would be chaotic.

Better Efficiency

A key benefit to data integration is efficiency. Automation makes everything go more smoothly, and integration is the first step to automating your existing processes. If you can free up your employees’ time to focus on more complicated tasks, they will get more important work done more quickly. Customers will thank you, and your employees will appreciate the fact that you have them doing rewarding work as opposed to busy work.

Cost Reduction

Efficiency and cost reduction often go hand in hand, and that’s no different with data integration. Because manual tasks are reduced company-wide, you can save money and prevent human error by allowing a computer to take over some of the more menial jobs in data.

Higher Quality Data

As if that wasn’t enough, data integration also increases the quality of your data. As long as your integration software is smart enough, all incoming data is validated and updates to your records happen in a flash. Before you know it, you’ll enjoy more accurate data without the time and effort normally required to receive it.

With these three benefits of data integration for your business, you can get the most out of your analytics team and use your data effectively.

How To Plan a Migration From a Non-SAP to an SAP Database

How To Plan a Migration From a Non-SAP to an SAP Database

by | | Data Migration, dataZap, SAP Data Migration

Migrating data is a complicated process and one you must get right to set your business up for success. Unfortunately, it’s easy to create problems in a data migration without proper time and effort. With that in mind, consider how to plan a migration from a non-SAP to an SAP database, as well as why you may want to make the switch.

Why Move to an SAP Database?

SAP HANA is a database, but it’s often referred to as a “data platform.” This is because SAP HANA offers much more than a traditional database, which is also why it has become so ubiquitous in the data world. If you’re looking for an application that can perform intense processes without causing a strain on your hardware, HANA is the answer.

A major difference between SAP HANA and other data platforms is that HANA uses in-memory processing. Instead of relying on your computer’s hardware—and the application you’re using—to perform processing and calculations, analysis happens in the database itself. Aside from that reason, why should you move to SAP HANA?

Big Data

Big Data is a trend that’s here to stay. Big Data has more of everything in both quantity and quality. The clearest way Big Data differentiates itself from data is in the three Vs—Big Data has greater variety with larger volume and higher velocity. Unlike other databases, SAP HANA can handle those three Vs with ease.
As the data landscape changes, companies that refuse to evolve with the times may find it difficult to keep up with others. Therefore, jumping into Big Data headfirst could be precisely what your business needs to stand out.

Scalability

“Scalability” is one of those business-jargon terms that’s actually more important than you might realize. Stasis is the death of a business, so solutions that provide room for exponential upward growth are invaluable. SAP HANA is easily scalable as your company grows and changes, meaning you can always be improving. Additionally, this is something that, like it or not, your shareholders need to see.

Currently, you can grow your SAP Business Warehouse up to a whopping 168TB of RAM. You read that right—not storage, RAM. To put it in perspective, that’s over 800 times the processing power of the average NASA computer. Suffice it to say, SAP HANA is more than capable of growing with you!

Real-Time Analytics

Not every business needs access to real-time analysis, but if yours does, you really need real-time analysis. SAP HANA is capable of providing up-to-the-minute information using its in-memory processes. Even basic HANA setups can process information several times faster than non-SAP databases. Simple reports will be done in the blink of an eye, while more comprehensive analyses will take perhaps two blinks.

Mobility

SAP HANA is nothing if not flexible and versatile. Your team will not need to leave their trusted interfaces behind when you switch to HANA, as one of the best things it boasts is compatibility. You can also easily apply HANA’s analysis to your old models. You may discover that old assumptions were off, meaning you can pivot your direction in response.

The Main Migration Types

The two main types of data migration are big bang and trickle migration, and each comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. Big bang migration is just like it sounds—you can perform your whole migration in one fell swoop. This usually leads to an operational system much more quickly, but with the potential for many more snags and issues along the way.

Trickle migration requires more thought at the onset as you must develop a plan to migrate parts of your system one at a time. This slow-and-steady plan allows you to keep both systems operational as data is transferred and helps avoid troubles and conundrums in implementation.

Trickle migration is generally recommended, but some companies want migration over and done with and use the big bang. Impatience is rarely a boon, so be wary of quick fixes.

Design a Migration Plan

The first step in any migration plan is to determine your migration goals. What technical specifications are you hoping to reach, and what do you want your new system to do that your old one could not? Once you’ve answered those questions, it becomes simple to begin the design process.

This initial stage is crucial for your final result, so ensure your team works diligently and documents everything to mitigate risks and reduce oversights. Even the smallest hiccup at this stage, if left unresolved, can create a massive headache later on.

Build Your Foundation

The second phase is all about executing the plan made in the previous step. While your team isn’t beginning the migration process yet, this is the time to lay the groundwork for migration day—or, more accurately, migration weeks. Your team should prepare equipment for the transition, set up security for data protection, and build whatever is needed to traverse your new space.

Begin Migration

Once the foundation is built, you can commence migration and begin to see the fruits of your labor. Traditionally, this will begin with all your non-critical systems. If you have systems in a sandbox stage, these should be transitioned first. Again, your migration plan is dictated by the plan you made in the first stage.

Even though it may be tempting to switch things around now that you’ve reached the end, do your best to stick to the plan you made. After all, you made it that way for a reason. Maintain a runbook during the transition so you can apply what you learn from each tier of migration to the next.

Optimize Your System

Finally, once the system is up and running and SAP migration is complete, you should prepare a team to optimize the system. Just because all your data is in a new place doesn’t mean your work is done. There are plenty of things left to do in order to create the most efficient system possible. Also, this stage won’t be super speedy, as it will likely take place over the first few months of operation.

Now that you know how to plan a migration from a non-SAP to an SAP database, set your business up to handle bigger data and improve your company’s scalability exponentially.

3 Oracle Data Migration Mistakes To Avoid

3 Oracle Data Migration Mistakes To Avoid

by | | Data Migration, dataZap, Oracle Data Migration

Data migration is a necessary part of any company’s life if they want to grow their business. We often see businesses realizing that their current database doesn’t have the structure and technology to support them for years in the future, so they switch to a new system like Oracle. Read on to learn three Oracle data migration mistakes to avoid.

Underestimating the Necessary Changes

A new database means a lot of changes. Even though there are some similarities across databases, you can’t avoid organizational and procedural differences. To hit the ground running with your new database, you must devote time to understanding how things will be different. Before beginning the migration, you should consider how management processes and support documentation need to change.

Not Enough Training

Just as you must consider changes from a managerial standpoint, you must also consider the differences for your employees. It will take time for your administrators to learn the ins and outs of the new platform, and they’ll need your support. Allow plenty of time for your administrators to become comfortable with new tools, commands, and utilities.

Choosing Big Bang Over Trickle Migration

The two main types of data migration are big bang and trickle migration. While each has some benefits, big bang migration has significant downsides. Essentially, big bang migration involves getting your whole migration process out of the way in one fell swoop. That may sound ideal, but it can leave you with a lot of problems with your data.

Trickle migration allows you to take things slowly, moving one system at a time. With this method, your Oracle data migration proceeds so that you’re able to correct any issues between batches of migration, leading to a more successful overall transition.

Now that you know these three Oracle data migration mistakes to avoid, set yourself up for a successful migration and enjoy your new database!