Business & supply chain challenges solved by integration

Yet, system integration is fundamental in ensuring businesses can use, collate, and share data effectively across on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. An absence of integration or a poorly implemented integration strategy can lead to lost profits, disgruntled customers, and inefficient order processing. Although integration works ‘behind the scenes’, it’s the foundation of an efficient and scalable business.

So, what are the real-world business and supply chain challenges that integration solves? 

#1 - Your supply chain is broken: Disparate data and applications are preventing a successful supply chain process.

We work with many businesses with broken supply chains, meaning their internal software and systems don’t talk to each other seamlessly and automatically. It’s commonplace to hear stories about failed customer order fulfilment due to a kink in the chain. For example, changes in one system that aren’t anticipated in another can mean orders aren’t shipped to the end customer. When this happens at scale, the business suffers from damage to its profits, customer loyalty, and reputation. 

One of Australia’s largest food logistics companies came to Fusion5 (formerly IntegrationWorks) and asked us to re-architect their point-to-point connections to modern protocols (i.e. RESTful APIs and web services) to provide delivery automation and effective operational management. The result was a completely streamlined, end-to-end process, from customer order to shipment. 

#2 - Your customer experience is clunky: Multiple interfaces, errors, and fulfilment issues.

It’s become increasingly important to prioritise the complete customer view and user experience and to put yourself in the customer's shoes in terms of how their order-to-fulfilment process works. 

When it comes to logistics and supply chain, the customer experience typically resembles a mishmash of paper-based ordering forms or a collection of disparate systems. These days, integration can completely unlock an online end-to-end user experience with best-of-breed technologies. 

Effective enterprise application integration re-designs the process from the beginning and digitises it, methodically structuring your tech with careful consideration for SLA requirements and best practices across myriad data points.  

Done right, integration can dramatically improve time-to-order processing and the overall customer experience. When dealing with large logistics companies with thousands upon thousands of orders, a negative, slow, or clunky customer experience could cost your business dearly. 

At Fusion5, we love working with local businesses. When we can sit together and map out the real human experience and ideal internal and customer-facing processes, we can re-architect rigid and monolithic systems that have been in place for decades. And because we’re technology-vendor agnostic, we’re able to identify and implement the best interface technologies. The more we can help our customers to make their customers happy, the better the experience will be at every layer of the supply chain. 

#3 - You've stopped competing with the market: IT modernisation and digital transformation has stalled.

97% of businesses are undergoing, or planning to undergo digital transformation, yet 84% of IT leaders say integration challenges are holding them back.  

Traditional integration isn’t enough to stay competitive anymore; many logistics and manufacturing companies are being forced to innovate in ways they’ve never considered. What was once a simple supply chain process can become tainted with complexity as you add in more backend systems and protocols. To modernise your IT environment and transactional processes, you need to factor in evolved integration strategies from the start. The more you intend to increase automation and implement systems, the more important integration becomes. 

It’s not that effective enterprise-grade integration is easy; it’s highly complex. The average business transaction now crosses 35 different back-end systems and generates more data than ever. However, when you employ integration experts with a core focus and diverse skill sets, what is rather complex can become simple and manageable. This provides your IT team with the necessary foundation to enable digital transformation and modernisation. 

We employ the best integration architecture experts and DevOps teams – and they all believe connected technology is fundamental to high-performing organisations. Paired with our world-class integration platform partners, including AWS, Azure, Kong, GCP, MuleSoft, and WS02, our experts work closely with our customers to align emerging technologies with reliable and proven best integration practices.