OIC and Application Integration

Have you implemented a new application, and it must coexist with the rest of the applications? Do you want to have data from heterogeneous environments in your corporate ERP? Have you acquired a new company, and systems integration is becoming a problem?

Digitalization, acquisition of other companies, or deployment of new environments ... Is this the case for your company?

In addition, it is quite usual that there are a lot of routine processes in any company that are not always performed in the most optimal or governed way possible (sometimes by exchanging emails).

In this blog, we explain how the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) solution responds to these 2 needs in a simple, economical, and agile way.

If you have reached this blog, you are probably familiar with the situation in which you are responsible or have participated in the process of integrating a new application with other existing applications for reasons such as:

• New deployment (of a new application), which has to coexist and interact with the rest of the ecosystem in the most transparent way possible.
• Acquisition or merger of companies with different ecosystems, which requires a migration process to a single system in order to consolidate the company's core information, usually an ERP, although it is also common for environments such as CRM, HCM, etc. to appear.
• Replacement (of a legacy application ), again, forcing the new system to interact with the other existing environments.

What is Oracle Integration Cloud?

Oracle Integration Cloud - OIC is an Oracle cloud service whose objective is to cover the integration needs of any type of company (as an Integration Hub), offering the following basic functionalities:

• Process Automation for workflow management, allowing the design, creation, and management of structured or dynamic processes to carry out any type of task that we need to proceed.
• Visual Builder for the construction of low-code applications for easy interaction with the platform.
• Integration, offering the necessary functionalities to connect to a given source (through the use of more than 70 prefabricated connectors or custom-made connectors), process the information (to adapt it to the target system), and finally connect to the destination (also through prefabricated or custom-made connectors) to deliver the data in question.

From theory to practice: Use cases

This blog is not intended to technically describe the capabilities of OIC, but the idea is that you understand what use cases can be easily solved using this PaaS (Platform as a Service) service.

First use case: Item registration in ERP

This first use case revolves around a common problem in many companies, especially those involved in equipment manufacturing, food, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc.

It is that the process of registering an item in your ERP is not a simple process, as it usually involves a series of intermediate steps such as approvals, verification of tests performed, conformity certifications, etc.

All this involves a process that can take quite a long time and, in many cases, is not fully automated, slowing down especially in manual operations, such as requesting the review of the documentation by email and waiting for a response.

Well, in this case, OIC helps us in the following way:

Visual Builder:

It offers us a simple way to build the interfaces so that users can interact with the process without the need to use manual means (sending documentation or approvals by mail, for example). In this way, by structuring the necessary information for each step, the time that each user must dedicate to the task assigned to him/her within the process is reduced, also increasing efficiency and eliminating errors that, in the end, mean time and money.

Process Automation:

We can design (in a drag&drop manner) the different workflows that will make up the process in question, determining what is done in each phase, who has to do it, what input and output information there should be and, not least, how process iterations are managed, i.e., what happens if someone does not give their approval because information is missing or the one that is there is not correct.

By offering a fairly intuitive interface, it allows the different users, each with their own role (requester, approver...), to interact with the process very easily, being notified in a timely manner every time there is a task in which they have to carry out some action.

Integration:

Once the workflow has been done correctly and all the previous steps have been carried out to be able to register an item in our ERP to start marketing it, we will perform the final step, either by:

• • Prefabricated connectors (if the target environment is a common application).
  • Tailor-made connectors (if the target environment is a proprietary development environment or has some particularity that prevents the use of prefabricated connectors).

Second use case: Master Data Integration between 2 different ERPs

Another of the problems that any company usually faces is the integration of heterogeneous applications, either by:

• The acquisition of a new application that replaces a legacy one.
• The purchase/merger between companies forces them to carry out the necessary actions to make the systems talk to each other until finally, if so decided, only one of them remains.

This use case will show how OIC solves the problem associated with having 2 different ERPs that have to coexist temporarily, with one of them acting as master when performing the tasks of, for example, accounting and invoicing.

In this case, although each of them will continue to work as usual, OIC will act as an integration hub that performs the following functionality:

• Visual Builder: as in the previous use case, it will simplify the integration management tasks, i.e., it will provide an intuitive and easy-to-build interface for those situations where there is a problem in the integration and human intervention is required. Let's imagine that there is a purchase order that does not meet certain criteria and, therefore, cannot be transferred as is to the target system and must be reviewed and/or validated by the financial controller. The financial controller will be notified that he has a pending task and can take the necessary actions depending on the problem to be solved.
• Integration: We will use connectors (prefabricated or customized) to extract information from the source ecosystem and insert it into the target or master system. For example, we can capture all the accounting information from the source ERP database and insert it into the target ERP database. In this step, Integration also allows us to perform operations and transformations on the data in order to adapt them to be accepted by the target ERP.
  
  
• Optionally, through Process Automation: we could implement an error management process, approvals, etc., i.e., we could enrich the process of taking data from one place to another with a series of workflows aimed at improving the integration process itself when the situation requires it.

We could say that in this use case, OIC acts as ETL (Extract - Transform - Load).