System integration

As the company has developed, you have been using increasingly newer tools. Along with them, new information and methods of processing it have emerged. You have noticed that the most costly operation in this process is the transfer of data between systems. This is where integrations come to the rescue. In this article, you will learn what integrations are, how to plan them, and how to implement them effectively.

Most often, it is an application or service responsible for transferring data between IT systems. Quite often, it also performs data processing operations along the way, so that the data matches the format of the target system. Typically, such a setup looks as follows:

Even though the diagram shows as many as five elements, in reality it is much simpler. Of course, it depends on the individual needs of the client. However, most often APIs are an integral part of specific systems. Very often the integration itself can also be a component of a single system rather than a separate application. One important thing to remember is that integration can be one-way (for example, sending data only from the accounting system to the warehouse system) or two-way.  

To a large extent, the type of information we transfer depends on the systems being integrated. On the integration side itself, there are no real limitations. Using it, we can transfer, for example:

• information about orders
• information about products
• documents (invoices, warehouse documents, etc.)
• zdjęcia lub inne media

If, in your company, information is frequently transferred between systems, it is very likely that this process can be automated with the help of integrations. This is one of the most common use cases for integrations, though not the only one. Very often, the implementation of an integration goes hand in hand with automating the whole process or parts of it.