Infor ION may be the answer.
Gartner forecasted end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021, and to continue to grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021 (read more here). Over the last few years, the industry trend has been to move to Cloud applications—either Cloud hosted or Software as a Service (SAAS)—and long term strategies to move core applications (i.e. Payroll, Asset Management) to the Cloud creates a transition period where some applications remain on-premises whilst some have moved to the Cloud.
Consequently, cost effective integration poses a mammoth challenge for users, with maintaining relevant data between on-premises applications and cloud applications often being a manual process prone to human errors. Inevitable delays in data synchronisation across applications leads to missing vital information which may affect timely decision making and reporting, and increase stress levels amongst end users. Reservations amongst organisations to maintain their financial information onsite due to country regulations on data sovereignty can also be a barrier to utilising cloud applications for all applications.
Infor ION (Intelligent Open Network) is a low-cost technology solution aimed at streamlining the exchange of information in the form of Business Objects that conform to the accepted international standard (Open Application Group Integration Specification – OAGIS) (Figure 1). ION, with its inbuilt supporting applications like Error Handler, Workflow Engine, and out-of-box connectors, enables real time integration of multiple applications through the exchange of data in the form Business Object Documents (BODs).
Figure 1: Schematic representation of Infor Intelligent Open Network (ION) using Business Object Documents to exchange data between applications on-premises or on Cloud.
A BOD is a message that is sent from an application to another using XML, JSON, DSV (Delimiter Separated Values), or any other data format. Currently, all the Infor standard BODs are based on XML. SunSystems (version 6.2 onwards) has a standard functionality called ION Integration which allows users to create BODs over a range of records within SunSystems for suppliers, account codes, analysis codes, as well as transactional information (i.e. ledger transactions).
Professional Advantage (PA) has successfully implemented integrations between SunSystems and iPOS (PA’s own Purchase Order System) and Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) using Infor ION. EAM is hosted on AWS, and SunSystems and iPOS on-premises (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Integration between Cloud Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and onsite SunSystems/Internet Purchasing System (iPOS).
The data exchange between SunSystems and EAM:
Master Data (from SunSystems to EAM):
- Suppliers.
- Address.
- Accounts.
- Currency Rates .
Transactional Data:
- Requisitions from EAM.
- Purchase Orders from iPOS.
- Goods Receipt from EAM.
- Invoices from iPOS.
ION allows for:
- Low-cost solution without additional software (ION comes as standard product with EAM on SunSystems), with the data flow between on-premises and Cloud applications.
- Secure, real-time data exchanges without costly API.
- ION Desk reports the status of all the integration in real time.
- ION Desk can email notifications for any remediation required.
If you have found any of this information useful, or would like to know more, you can reach out to us or comment below.
