Never Settle for Less than Full Integration
Ensuring transactions move seamlessly and in real-time across disparate systems is mission critical in manufacturing. By streamlining and automating transaction flows, you increase efficiency and enhance profitability. So why are you settling for less than fully integrated systems?
We talk to a lot of manufacturers, and many are dragging their feet on integrating their business systems. There are many valid reasons, but many are fooling themselves – they tell us they are integrated when they really aren’t.
“Yes, we are integrated. Olivia just has to do a series of 12 steps in perfect order at 3pm every day.”
Good old Olivia, she can be counted on to come to work every day, never get sick and never quit working, right? What happens when she wants to take a vacation? If you have any manual or semi-manual steps you need to make for your integrations to work, then your systems aren’t fully integrated.
“Yes, we are integrated, there are just a few things that have to be rekeyed.”
If you are still transferring data or rekeying data from one system to another, your systems aren’t fully integrated. The purpose of integration is to avoid error-prone rekeying or manually transferring data from one system to another.
“We tried to integrate but there aren’t any tools that will work for the legacy systems we are using, and the quote for custom integration was beyond our budget.”
This is a big one. We’ve talked about the cost of custom integrations before. The key to a good integration is its ability to work with all of your systems as they exist today and as they are updated in the future.
You shouldn’t have to settle for a partial integration. Your business systems drive your productivity, so why settle for less? When your pre-built solution that should be good enough just isn’t, you need a powerful, flexible and extensible integration or workflow solution for your manufacturing shop floor.
The LINK® is flexible and can work with your custom systems through a variety of methods including HTTP. FTP, tables, files, web methods, web API’s, message buses, local API’s, local dll’s, and more. Let us (or even your own IT department) build exactly what you need – without settling.
