Interest is growing among IT executives in the benefits offered by relatively new developments in the business integration arena such as service oriented architectures (SOA). By improving communication and integration between IT systems regardless of theBusiness integration , Service Oriented Architectures, Electronic Data Interchange, Enterprise Service Bus.

Codreanu Diana

Radut Carmen

English

Research Papers in Economics

1035 
BUSINESS INTEGRATION 
 
Rădu  Carmen  
Universitatea „Constantin Brâncoveanu” - Piteşti, Facultatea Management Marketing în Afaceri Economice Rm. 
Vâlcea, Str. Aleea Cocorilor, nr.5, Bl.25, Sc.D, Ap.2 Rm.Vâlcea, c_radut@yahoo.com, 0723245092 
Codreanu Diana  
Universitatea „Constantin Brâncoveanu” - Piteşti,Facultatea Management Marketing în Afaceri Economice Rm. 
Vâlcea Str. Mihai Eminescu, nr.47, Bl.C13, Sc.A, Ap.16, Rm.Vâlcea, codreanudia@yahoo.com, 0743167718 
 
Interest is growing among IT executives in the benefits offered by relatively new developments in the business integration 
arena  such  as  service  oriented  architectures  (SOA).  By  improving  communication  and  integration  between  IT  systems 
regardless  of  the  underlying  technology,  SOA  is  just  one  factor  that  is  making  it  increasingly  easy  and  quick  to  share 
information and reproduce best practice, not only internally but also within an extended business partner community. 
 
Business integration , Service Oriented Architectures, Electronic Data Interchange, Enterprise Service Bus. 
 
Introduction  
Most large businesses introduced EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) many years ago to enable them to exchange 
business critical information electronically with their trading partners. EDI was expected to eliminate the manual 
processes  that  result  in  increased  order  processing  and  lead  times,  introduce  human  error,  and  cause  lost 
information due to incomplete fax transmissions, mislaid paperwork and unanswered phone calls. In reality, the 
technology has struggled to fulfil its true potential. 
Traditional EDI relied on transforming information into an agreed message format and exchanging it between 
trading partners via dial-up connections over a VAN (Value Added Network) – a third party mailbox system. 
Implementing EDI solutions, maintaining the skills needed to produce data in the correct format for exchange and 
sending data over a VAN has proven to be expensive. Large organisations that can afford to take advantage of the 
technology's undoubted benefits have failed to see their ROI fully realised because there was no cost-effective 
solution available for their smaller trading partners, limiting the success of EDI as take-up rates were much lower 
than initially forecast. 
Today this situation is rapidly changing. The international availability of the Internet, the 'commoditisation' of 
technology, plus related universally accepted data structures such as XML are transforming the way that data is 
exchanged, opening up the benefits of business integration to all. 
Assessing where your organisation is today and identifying where you can make effective changes is an obvious 
first step to maximising the benefits to be gained from business integration. 
Figure 1 indicates a range of integration stages that organisations across various industries can find themselves at - 
from traditional EDI to current best practice. In order to reach best practice, businesses can take two main routes, 
they can rely on B2B gateway applications (developed inhouse or by a specialist vendor) or they can find a trusted 
partner to provide integration as a service . 
Developments  in  technology  are  undoubtedly  making  it  much  easier  to  benefit  from  business  integration  by 
reducing the traditional barriers to entry previously faced by smaller businesses. 
The adoption of the Internet, in particular, represents a turning point as it provides a robust, more flexible and cost-
effect alternative to traditional EDI based on VANs. However, there are still challenges to be faced. As typical 
trading communities continue to increase in size, for example, managing them efficiently can become a drain on in-
house skills, resources and time. 
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Figure 1: Business integration development model 
 
Figure 2 shows how, as the traditional barriers to business integration have fallen, the number of trading partners 
able to become e-enabled has risen. It also shows the range of capabilities enterprises need if they wish to make the 
most of the opportunities available to them. 
By employing the correct business integration strategies, organisations can implement solutions that help optimise 
and support critical business processes. A tight coupling between ERP systems, e-business and other applications 
combined with the ability to exchange data in multiple formats with customers, suppliers and partners leads to a 
collaborative, business process based, virtual enterprise. 
Processes  and  supply  chains  become  visible  from  end-to-end,  business  activities  can  be  closely  monitored  to 
provide an early alert to potential problems and rules and workflow can be built-in to provide greater control. 
 
Figure 2. The traditional barriers to business integration 
 
Using just a web browser, data from even the smallest business can be seamlessly created, transformed into the 
correct format and transmitted to a partner as easily as sending an email. Likewise, small businesses can receive 1037 
and manage documents just as simply. No matter how small or where in the world a company is located, it can 
become part of a global supply chain hosted by a major organisation. 
The business benefits of effective business integration include: 
- Improved customer service – shorter lead times for order fulfilment, a reduction in errors, improved tracking 
and visibility of orders and better communications throughout the supply chain. 
- Reduced costs - more efficient processes, improved productivity and lower inventory carrying costs. 
- Increased profits - reduced costs, quicker product development and a shorter time to market. 
As business integration evolves, many early adopters of EDI technology – large enterprises - find they have an 
inflexible solution that has been in place for years and has suffered from under investment over time. There is 
probably a monolithic ERP system at the centre of the organisation onto which an EDI or B2B gateway solution 
has been bolted. Often a great deal of complex custom code is required to deliver business process management 
and provide the capabilities needed to get data into legacy applications. It may be necessary to convert data from 
EDI formats into XML and back again simply to pass it around the organisation. 
In this typical scenario,  the speed and accuracy with which data can be moved is compromised. The increasing 
volume and variety of data produced today becomes a challenge. Add to this the fact that old technologies may no 
longer be supported, the skills associated with them are becoming scarce, and existing knowledge within the 
organisation is likely to be held by a small number of ageing experts and you have a situation that makes it difficult 
to integrate new protocols, message types and services. Managing trading communities in today’s fast changing, 
international environment is complex, especially when it is no longer unusual to have to cope with data from 
thousands of partners. 
Smaller organisations face a different set of challenges. Most will be  considering EDI or business integration 
solutions in response to a request from a major customer and will naturally feel reluctant to change their existing 
technology or business processes. Many perceive significant barriers as they are unlikely to have a large – or 
indeed any – in-house IT resource. 
 
The business integration solution 
Over time, the information technology landscape inside of and amongst companies changes in fits and starts with 
new  applications,  products  and  technologies  coming  and  going.  Ideally,  information  would  flow  between 
applications like electricity through some equivalent of standard wall outlets and plugs. While things continue to 
get easier and despite what product vendors have promised over the years, significant challenges remain in sharing 
information services without significant costs, risks and brittle custom development.  
Part of the challenge lies in keeping up with changes to the IT landscape. Changes occur as businesses seek 
efficiencies and improved services to customers and partners and because of drivers, such as company mergers and 
upgrades to packaged and custom enterprise applications. The business need, business value and technical ease of 
integrating disparate internal and external systems are growing as the capabilities, costs, standardization and ease of 
implementation of commercial products are improving.  
Historically, when enterprise applications needed to share information with other applications, custom one-off or 
other proprietary approaches were implemented for each specific case. Over time, these point solutions create a 
myriad of stovepipe custom connections between components with many moving parts, each requiring different 
specialized skills. Without a central architecture, reuse strategy and business integration solution, the following 
problems will emerge:  
a) Interdependencies between applications and integration code make upgrades and enhancements expensive, 
time consuming, risky and unsupportable.  
b) Hidden dependencies and bypassing of security and business rules through direct data access results in erratic 
and incorrect results and difficult-to-diagnose problems.  
c) Lack of discipline and standards in developing point-to-point integration solutions leads to maintenance and 
management nightmares with different languages, tools, incompatible versions and approaches.  
d)  Security  is  largely  unmanaged  –  connections  between  applications  are  controlled  within  each  custom 
developed connection with no ability to effectively manage access. G
Part  of  the  solution  to  integration  problems  lies  in  architectural  governance  over  the  selection,  design  and 
development of integration products across all applications. Achieving central control is more difficult than it 
sounds.  In  addition  to  understanding  internal  enterprise  applications,  awareness  of  industry  products,  trends, 
standards  and  best  practices  are  all  key  requirements  for  designing  and  implementing  a  corporate  integration 
strategy.  
A second part of the solution lies in the architecture and implementation of a business integration technology 
platform. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), message broker and business process management products from vendors, 
such as IBM, Microsoft, Tibco and WebMethods provide an integration framework for:  
a) Data translation (e.g., to and from various XML and non-XML, standard and custom formats).  1038 
Use of software adaptors that can connect to a large variety of commercial packaged applications and technologies, 
such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Ariba, CommerceOne, CICS and others over a variety of protocols via standard plug-in 
interfaces.  
Routing of messages between applications based on content or availability.  
Central management of message flows (including security and failure detection).  
Live central monitoring of key corporate metrics (e.g., number of orders flowing through a hub).  
Security of message flows between applications.  
Tenets of long-lived enterprise scale system design are easily realized with a well- architected integration solution 
based  on  products  such  as  WebSphere  Business  Integration  Message  Broker,  Microsoft  BizTalk  Server  or 
WebMethods. Design principles used in the implementation of integration solutions are: loose coupling between 
applications;  short  and  asynchronous  transactions;  service-oriented  interfaces  (focus  on  use/reuse  of  business 
services of a system vs. via direct access to data); and reuse through use of industry standards and best practices.  
The  combination  of  ESB  and  message  broker  products,  XML  and  Web-based  standards,  and  a  SOA-based 
approach to application and commercial product implementations sets the stage for efficient and standardized 
integration architecture. 
 
Conclusion 
Unfortunately  smaller  businesses  unable  or  reluctant  to  move  with  the  times  find  themselves  increasingly 
disadvantaged in the global market. 
Without the ability to easily exchange data and integrate it into back office systems they are forced to rely on 
costly, error prone manual processes that affect business agility. A reluctance to adopt new standards and practices 
will drastically affect their ability to trade in the future. 
 
Bibliography 
1. Andre Yee Sams,  Integrating Your e-Business Enterprise, , Paperback, Published March 2001, 257 pages 
2. Bos, C.F.M., "A framework for Uncertainty Quantification and Technical-to-Business Integration for Improved 
Decision-Making", paper SPE94109 presented at the SPE Europec conference Madrid, June 2005. 
3. Beth Gold-Bernstein, William Ruh,  Enterprise Integration The Essential Guide to Integration Solutions, Jul 
2004, Paperback, 432 pages 
4.  Beth  Gold-Bernstein,  William  Ruh,    The  Essential  Guide  to  Integration  Solutions,  July  16,  2004,  Pearson 
Education 
5. Iyengar, Ashok; Jessani, Vinod; Chilanti, Michele, WebSphere Business Integration Primer: Process Server, 
BPEL, SCA, and SOA Group: J2EE - IBM WEBSPHERE,  421  pages 
 
 
   

A framework for Uncertainty Quantification and Technical-to-Business Integration for Improved Decision-Making&quot;,

Enterprise Integration The Essential Guide to Integration Solutions,

Sams, Integrating Your e-Business Enterprise,

The Essential Guide to Integration Solutions,

BUSINESS INTEGRATION

http://steconomice.uoradea.ro/anale/volume/2009/v4-management-and-marketing/212.pdf

BUSINESS INTEGRATION

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