Technology Services

Enterprise Application Integration Capabilities

Introduction

RDA is an expert in delivering a variety of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions. By using BizTalk Server, our clients have greatly streamlined areas such as workflow management, Electronic Document Interchange (EDI), the introduction of new services and the conservation of existing applications. In addition, adding an integration platform such as BizTalk has greatly increased our clients' ability to connect with trading partners and customers and offers them exciting new opportunities to adopt new technologies such as RFID.

Business processes often involve human interactions, which is why BizTalk Server contains a workflow engine. This is one of the keys of integration and business process management (BPM). Housing the steps for a process in a consistent unit allows for greater efficiency and an easier understanding of tasking for employees. When tasks and services are linked together into workflows whose steps are interchangeable, significant cost savings can be achieved. This is especially true when a tool like BizTalk is used to extend the life of legacy applications and mainframes.

More than ever, businesses need to be able to transact with customers, outside partners, and third-party providers. Well-adopted standards for transactions with trading partners such as EDI, SWIFT or HIPPA are well supported within BizTalk Server and have helped our clients adopt these new standards in a more efficient way.

Enterprise Application Integration platforms allow for controlled administration, deployment and end-point management of services. Governance of often disparate IT resources can create headaches, which is why a well-designed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is invaluable because it can cut through the specific needs of users and administrators and centralize them in a more efficient way.

RDA has a team of experienced EAI specialists who are trained and certified in developing applications in BizTalk Server. We have a long track record of successful engagements, which is why RDA can be trusted to deliver excellent results.

Here are some of the different services we offer related to BizTalk Server:

• Architectural guidance
• BizTalk development (staff augmentation and full life cycle)
• ‘Up-to-speed’ and best practices with BizTalk
• Proof of concepts
• Project management
• Problem solving and performance improvements
• BizTalk training

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to gain prominence as an application development strategy. Unfortunately, the idea that SOA is somehow new or a departure from current development methodologies is a false notion.

Distributed architectures can be seen as an early version of SOA. Distributed architectures were service oriented in that they dealt with services split among multiple computers running simultaneously in a fairly tightly coupled way. The evolutionary step which differentiates distributed services and SOA is the governance aspect, where endpoints and links between services are managed under a common platform, often called ‘middleware.'

SOA enables platform independence, loosely coupled services, and self discovery, enabling a formal separation between services.

By leveraging SOA, your enterprise essentially becomes a collection of services that you can link together without formal links within the processes themselves. This means there is a layer which is responsible for this endpoint management and it enables services and software to evolve and change without any of the endpoints needing to be aware of it. This reduces and often eliminates the need to re-work services, change configuration, and re-deploy assets which can be a long term cost saver from an IT maintenance perspective.

The communication can involve either simple messaging or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. BizTalk Server has tools available to create this loosely coupled environment.

RDA can offer an SOA workshop to delve deeper into issues surrounding the architecture, as well as an architectural assessment where your company can leverage the experience of RDA’s consultants to help guide your business down a SOA path.

EAI/BPM

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking disparate applications together in order to automate business processes without changing the existing applications or data structures behind them. The resulting services enable a sharing of data and business processes among connected applications or data sources within the enterprise.

Often times, whether through growth by acquisition, software incompatibilities or bad planning, applications such as supply chain management, CRM, accounting tools, custom development or legacy mainframes cannot communicate with each other. Solutions exist which would require wholesale changes to the entire enterprise but this path is prohibitively expensive and will lock your company down for the long haul into a situation which may not be viable in the future.

Through the use of EAI, each separate department can maintain its way of working with the software their staff is already trained in, yet still benefit from the ability to cross over into different islands of automation to automate larger scale business processes, otherwise known as Business Process Management (BPM).

With BPM, processes can be monitored and automated to react to specific events or actions by a user. As a result, administration is reduced by automating time-consuming manual processes. Bottom line is cost savings and freeing staff for higher lever tasking.

 A highly scalable EAI tool like BizTalk server is an ideal platform because of its innate ability to adapt to changes in the company, capacity for absorption of new businesses, and extensive set of integration specific tools.

BizTalk Server is ideal for communicating with different operating systems, mainframes, databases, and tools such as SAP. In some situations, an EAI system must act as the broker between multiple applications or to be the exposure points for multiple applications whereby access to these applications are governed by BizTalk (as a front end). In all cases, BizTalk Server is ideally suited for these needs.

BizTalk provides the ideal platform for automation and RDA provides expertise in designing and developing such BizTalk solutions. We have a long track record of success in EAI/BPM projects and would be an ideal partner for establishing such a platform in your organization.

EDI

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a globally recognized set of standards for structuring specific business transactions to be electronically exchanged between trading partners.

BizTalk server offers a complete set of EDI schemas (which represent EDI transactions) out of the box. In combination with an extensive set of adapters which can connect with virtually any messaging protocol (FTP, file, HTTP, email, etc) BizTalk Server offers the most complete document interchange solution available in the market today.

EDI is still the data format used for the vast majority of electronic commerce transactions in the world. Many businesses have an EDI transaction mechanism in place, but often the processes behind the scenes are not automated. BizTalk can be utilized here to process the EDI transaction into legacy mainframes or ERP systems and eventually take over the traditional EDI processing as the EDI engine becomes a legacy system.

BizTalk Server can also process EDI messages using AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) specification that enables transport of business data over the Internet.

RDA has an extensive resume of enabling EDI transactions using BizTalk Server. We can review your EDI usage and develop a plan on how to convert to BizTalk transactions. These transactions can then be wrapped into messaging workflows, providing automation to the many different systems EDI touches.

RFID

Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFID) allows companies to track and manage inventory, critical assets, and physical objects of all sorts. RFID has grown significantly over the last few years to where it is today: a valuable cost saver for companies with supply chain management requirements, large numbers of assets to manage, retail outlets, and security requirements.

RFID technology is based on RFID printers, wireless readers and printed tags. Assets can be tagged using RFID enabled printers, and then tagged ‘assets’ can be read at any time to pinpoint the object’s whereabouts. Items with RFID tags can be tracked in an automated way from a warehouse, factory floor or retail store, which gives an IT user a real-time snapshot to the company’s inventory.

Microsoft has introduced RFID as a code base to be leveraged within BizTalk Server. The Microsoft RFID code base allows for a large range of readers (many are now USB enabled and plug and play), and with an extensive network of partners it provides an excellent choice for enabling RFID within the enterprise.

RDA is very interested in hearing more about your RFID requirements and discussing how we can leverage our extensive knowledge of BizTalk Server to begin saving you money.

 

Business Activity Monitoring

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a set of tools built into BizTalk Server allowing business users to monitor transactions (aggregate or real-time) and to provide visibility into key performance indicators and metrics of a running business process.  These metrics can be both operational (e.g. transactions processed per hour) or business related (e.g. total number of dollars ordered per day).  This data is captured into a dimensional model that can be made available to users via an out-of-the-box portal, or any number of other tools including SQL Reporting Services, SharePoint, Excel, etc.

BAM can also generate alerts when certain conditions or thresholds are reached.  It gives businesses end-to-end visibility into different processes and provides accurate information about the status and eventual results of chosen operations, data within the operations, processes, and transactions.  This capability allows businesses to derive valuable information about transactions flowing through the network and can also enable the rapid addressing of problem areas.