In the modern business world, applications that enable businesses to carry out their operational processes must work collaboratively and improve each other’s performance. Any incompatibility between applications results in inefficiencies, financial losses and missed opportunities. The role of application integration begins with ensuring that applications work in harmony with each other. Continue reading the blog to learn more about application integration.
What is The Purpose of Application Integration?
Application integration is a process that ensures that applications developed for different goals work in harmony with each other, that is, communicate. By combining and optimizing the flow of data between various software applications, businesses can achieve integrations that update their infrastructure and support flexible business operations.
Today, companies use many applications, from cloud solutions to on-premises systems. Application integration bridges the gap by connecting on-premises systems with cloud-based applications. It offers businesses interconnected processes and data exchange. In this way, it allows operational tasks to be carried out more efficiently and effectively.
Application Integration Main Components
It has some components for application integration to organize and connect processes between different applications. These components consist of API, data mapping, and events and actions.
Application Programming Interface (API)
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of functions and procedures that enable software applications to interact with each other and tell them how they should interact. It allows various applications to easily communicate and exchange data.
Data Mapping
Data mapping is the process of harmoniously relating information between different data sources. This means matching data that resides in different systems and has different formats or structures. In the enterprise world, organizations often use data replication processes when they want to integrate data from various databases, applications, or platforms. Data replication maintains data integrity and ensures consistency and accuracy across data.
Events and Actions
Events usually refer to specific states or triggering events that occur within an application. These events can include a variety of activities, such as a user filling out a form, making a payment, or updating a record.
Actions represent actions taken as a result of triggering an event. For example, various actions include adding data to a database, sending an email, or communicating with another application in case an event occurs.
Benefits of Application Integration
When applications do not communicate with each other, it becomes very difficult to ensure data accuracy, obtain real-time data, improve customer experience and ensure process automation. App integration eliminates data silos by integrating applications. Thus, businesses have the opportunity to use their systems efficiently to provide more benefits.
Four benefits that make application integration important are as follows:
Data Accuracy Increases.
In business processes where there is no integration, each application is a separate entity in itself. This siled structure causes data inconsistencies because changes made in one system will not automatically occur in the other system. To avoid this, employees must manually enter or update data into the system. However, this method is both time-consuming and very error-prone.
Application integration eliminates silos between systems and ensures that changes made in one system are automatically updated in other systems. It also eliminates manual work, ensures data accuracy and speeds up the decision-making process.
Provides Process Automation
Data wrangling is a highly complex process for businesses, involving large amounts of sensitive information across many applications. Integration automates businesses’ processes to streamline their business operations. It also automates tasks such as data synchronization and information exchange, eliminating manual processes, reducing error rate and increasing efficiency.
Provides Real-Time Analysis
Application integration allows instant synchronization of data from different units and functions. Each stakeholder has the opportunity to easily access up-to-date information without any delay in sales, customer support, finance or operational areas. At the same time, automatic data synchronization strengthens decision-making by providing true visibility into the data. Managers gain the opportunity to make more accurate decisions with a holistic view of operational data.
Use Cases for Application Integration
With the development of technology, more and more businesses are focusing on implementing integration strategies and modernizing their legacy systems.
Here are some use cases for industry-specific application integration:
Application Integration (AI) in Finance
Application integration in the financial sector includes accounting software, payment processing, financial analysis tools, etc. can be used to integrate. This increases the efficiency of finance departments and improves financial reporting processes.
AI in Healthcare
Integration of various healthcare applications such as healthcare systems, hospital management systems, billing platforms and electronic health records provides a seamless communication environment. This way, a patient’s health records can be automatically updated, meaning increased accuracy, consistency and processing speed.
AI in E-commerce Industry
Application integration can be used to integrate e-commerce operations such as online sales platforms, inventory management, payment processing and customer information, optimize ordering processes and improve customer experience.
To learn more about Application Integration, you can take a look at our contents:
Enterprise Application Integration Types
Advantages of Application Integration for Businesses 