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How Integration Can Improve Your Supply Chain Management

The efficient management of logistics processes involving multiple business partners is one of the main challenges faced by companies in the supply chain vertical.

There are many systems involved in the supply chain such as warehouse management systems (WMS), transportation management systems (TMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and much more.

However, the use of multiples of business systems and applications does not yet guarantee success.

The most important thing in the supply chain is the flow of information between the different systems, in a timely and efficient manner; this is called “data integration” which is necessary so different heterogenous systems can “communicate” with each other in a close to “real-time” fashion.

What is Supply Chain Management (SCM)?

Wikipedia gives the most accurate definition: “In commerce, supply chain management (SCM), the management of the flow of goods and services, money and information, involves the movement and storage of raw materials, of work-in-process inventory, and of finished goods as well as end to end order fulfilment from point of origin to point of consumption”.

In other words, the supply chain is the delivery of a product to a consumer. Which includes all stages from the transformation of raw materials into a finished product to delivery to the final consumer.

The main goal of the supply chain management is to coordinate all stages of the process to minimize overall costs and obtain the greatest efficiency.

What is “Integration” in the Supply Chain?

In information technology, integration is the connection of data, systems, applications, or devices to improve efficiency, productivity, and flexibility.

The purpose of integration in supply chain management is to combine different business systems responsible for different functions (warehouse, resource planning, accounting, electronic data interchange, etc.) that belong to different business partners to create a single efficient logistics system.

Internal and External Supply Chain Integration

There are two concepts in supply chain integration. Internal and external integration.

Internal integration is the interconnection of various business systems within one company.

External integration is the interaction between business partners through the interconnection of their numerous business systems responsible for various functions in logistics.

Typical examples of companies involved in the supply chain that require integration:
  • suppliers of raw materials and supplies
  • manufacturers of finished products
  • warehouses, 3 pl warehouses
  • transport companies and carriers
  • buyers (retailers, various companies, and organizations)
  • various intermediaries

Platform for full data integration across the entire supply chain

To improve efficiency, all companies involved in the supply chain need to simultaneously exchange data from different business systems. In other words, as previously mentioned, they need external integration.

Why is external integration so important? Integration in the supply chain is important because usually, any transaction goes through multiple systems such as ERP, CRM, financial, or warehouse systems. Normally, data for the same transaction must be transferred to the business partner (customer, supplier, 3pl warehouse, etc.). After receiving the data, the business partner must enter it into their business systems.

If companies have no integrated systems, data is transferred and processed manually or by downloading spreadsheets or files. Those processes are not efficient, they require a lot of resources and time, and there is a high risk of errors and data loss.

With the integration platform, companies can quickly and easily automate the exchange of information.

Useful reading: How to Choose the Right Integration Platform?

Integration platform for automating data entry

The goal of systems integration is to reduce costs and efforts for all participants in the supply chain process.

Manually entering duplicate information into several business systems takes a lot of time. Sometimes it requires hiring additional employees just to perform some of these mechanical functions. Furthermore, multiple manual entries into various systems are prone to human errors and less quality of information.

With the help of an integration platform like Magic xpi, you can quickly automate the data entry process, by reducing the time for entering data and ensuring their accuracy.

Besides, the use of modern gadgets, such as tablets and smartphones, allows data entry directly in the field (for example, when receiving goods at a warehouse), which speeds up information flows and improves customer service.

Magic xpi integration platform for efficient supply chain demand forecasting

Demand forecasting is the process of estimating future consumer demand over a given period using historical sales data and other information.

It is no secret that demand forecasting is very important for effective Supply Chain Management. Demand forecasting affects important business operations such as financial planning, raw material planning, production planning, marketing, and sales plans, as well as risk assessment.

Download Magic xpi product overview

Magic xpi can help you achieve more accurate forecasts by ensuring perfect coordination between your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

This will lead to increased profits and higher competitive advantage.

Magic xpi integration platform to improve transportation process

ERP integration with EDI, warehouse management system, and yard management software will help to improve transportation processes.

Magic xpi B2B Integration

The integration of these business systems provides instant information exchange and can significantly reduce downtime.

Thus, you or your transport companies will have more time to deliver the goods.

The best integration solution for Supply chain management

Supply chain management is a broad topic in which the integration of business systems plays a key role. Data integration can help manage all the necessary processes to ensure a smooth flow at all stages of the supply chain. It can significantly improve all the processes in the supply chain, ensure fast order fulfillment, reduce cost, and improve customer service.

Being a business partner with Magic Software Enterprises for over 20 years now, we provide powerful integration solutions. We have been helping our clients make their business profitable by integrating systems.

Contact us for a free consultation.

You may also be interested in reading about:

E-commerce Integration with business systems – outperform the competition

The purpose of this article is to highlight the major points of e-commerce integration with business software systems such as ERP or CRM and others.

Let us start with a high-level definition of important terminologies.

What is an e-commerce platform?

An e-commerce platform is software platform, that enables companies to launch, host, and manage their online eCommerce store, normally in a “self-service” model.

According to various sources, there are more than 300 different e-commerce platforms in the marketplace. They all offer different features and terms of use but allow merchants to create an online store to sell their products.

In other words, thanks to e-commerce platforms, companies and individuals can create or expand their e-commerce business without coding and web design skills; most importantly, without the need of a large budget to implement such projects.

Online shopping is one of the most popular online activities

The incredible number of e-commerce platforms, as well as the huge number of online stores opening every day, are driven by the growing interest of consumers in online shopping.

Moreover, in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of online shopping in the grocery segment and among local businesses has also grown.

According to Statista, online shopping is one of the most popular online activities worldwide, thus a global number of digital buyers is growing rapidly. Over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016.

Why is e-commerce important in 2021?

Just some 5-8 years ago, it was common for a small business to work offline only. The companies did not have their e-commerce sites and did not run online sales. It seemed to them that this was not necessary to invest time and effort in the e-commerce business.

Times have changed and companies began to develop more and more online businesses. However, the turning point came in early 2020, caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic and massive lockdowns. Due to restrictions, many sellers, especially those who did not expand their e-commerce business, were on the verge of collapse. Continue sales despite the closure of physical stores has become vital even for a local business.

Now the company may no longer have an offline store or even not have an office with employees. Everything goes online. Workers around the world had to switch to a “work from home model” (WFH)

Huge sales happen through online stores or marketplaces like Amazon.

However, creating your own online store does not guarantee success yet. The next challenge is customer satisfaction.

According to HubSpot 80% of respondents said they had stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer experience.

Thus, customer satisfaction depends on how you are going to handle online sales in the future. How quickly, efficiently, and accurately you can process orders. How fast and correctly you will manage inventory, etc. To do this you need to synchronize your e-commerce website with your internal business system (ERP/CRM or accounting)

In other words, the success of online sales largely depends on the level of your ecommerce integration with other business systems of the company.

Leading e-commerce platforms in 2020

Despite the fact that there are huge varieties of e-commerce platforms, there are certainly unchanging leaders among them.

In the top of e-commerce platforms are:

If you want to learn more about e-commerce platforms, check out this article: The Top 9 Absolute Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2021

Why you need e-commerce Integration?

If the online store operates independently, for example without connecting the company’s ERP system, employees have to manually upload product data; enter customer delivery addresses, tracking codes, etc. Each order placed through the online shop must be manually transferred to the business systems. The manual data entry always carries a high risk of human error. Moreover, it is ineffective and leads to delays in fulfilling. Besides, if the process is completely dependent on the staff, order processing cannot be processed on weekends.

Thus, achieving high efficiency and profitability of a company business, as well as customer satisfaction, is almost impossible.

To increase the efficiency of its online store, a company needs to integrate its back-end systems with its e-commerce platform. In this case, all key information such as customer data, delivery information, orders, and warehouse stock levels will be automatically synchronized and do not require human intervention.

Most common third-party eCommerce Integration

Systems listed below are commonly integrated with e-commerce platforms for product master data, customer records, financial transaction, and supplier management and so on:

  • ERP (Enterprise resource planning)
  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
  • PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)
  • SCM (Supply chain management)

Typical Integration Tasks

– Automate online orders, improve efficiency, and meet delivery times.

– Improved data accuracy

– Stop using employees to enter data and perform repetitive tasks

– Perform integration without internal IT specialists.

Integration platform

It is very important to choose an integration solution that connects your e-commerce online store with back-end systems, as well as for real-time integration and a robust scalable integration platform.

We provide a fully managed and cost-effective integration solution to integrate your e-commerce store seamlessly and quickly with all leading business systems such as:
e-commerce ERP integration

With Magic xpi integration platform, we integrate quickly and seamlessly using a no-code visual drag and drop approach as well as large numbers of certified connectors.

Integrate easily, quickly, and efficiently with the best experts and solutions

At any stage of the development of your online store, we can quickly and efficiently set up data exchange with your business system. Bi-directional data exchange such as
  • customer information
  • sales orders
  • order status
  • stock information and so on.

To find out more about synchronizing with an online store, contact us.

Call (450) 681-3009 or use the form below to contact our integration specialist!

Free Consultation

Best Practices for Improving E-Commerce Supply Chain Management

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.


Currently, many businesses are operating their own eCommerce stores on Shopify or Amazon to sell their products and services over the Internet to clients and consumers, all over the world. This is a great way to increase sales and brand awareness.

United States: top 10 online stores

The e-commerce market in the United States is constantly evolving. According to Statista’s forecasts, in the coming years, retail sales of B2C e-commerce in the US will grow rapidly: from 315.6 billion US dollars in 2018 to more than 565.7 billion US dollars in 2023. The most popular online store in the United States is, of course, Amazon.com, the second most popular is Walmart.com
United States: top 10 online stores

As you can see in the graph above, at the top of the e-commerce rating are the 2 largest retailers:

Amazon.com, Inc. is a global e-commerce corporation that provides online retail, consumer electronics, digital content and other services such as daily deals and local groceries. The greatest part of the company’s revenue is generated from third-party seller revenues, subscription services, and AWS activities. Due to quality standards and global reach, Amazon is considered one of the most valuable brands in the world.

Walmart, Inc. is one of the biggest retail chains offering low prices and immensely varied products, giving Walmart a competitive edge.

Challenge of efficient e-commerce transaction

Whatever you choose, open your own online store on one of the most popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento or sell on Amazon, or deal with Walmart, Home Depot, Target, etc. it is very beneficial for companies of all size and various industries to expand their online business.

However, many executives still do not consider a full integration between there online store, and their business management system (ERP, CRM), as a must and important option to adopt.

Efficient supply chain management and prompt exchange of the necessary information between trading partners is the key to the success of your electronic business and the high satisfaction of your customers.

Download our whitepaper for more information about Shopify integration.

The main problems that online store owners may encounter when they omit a full integration between their store and their ERP are as follows:
  • They must hire more staff to manage their supply chain, in order to respond to growing customer demands.
  • It is difficult to balance incoming demand and production (in case the company is a manufacturer)
  • Problematic transfer of inquiries and information between several business partners involved in the supply chain channel.

The challenge with supply chain management is to synchronize the supply chain with consumer demand and measure the productivity and success rate. Therefore, below are 3 useful tips to overcome these challenges:

Integrated ERP Solutions

Having one platform to manage and run a business can make all the difference. A fully integrated software system will be able to efficiently manage an eCommerce and retail business and eliminate the need to key-in information from the online store to the management system manually.

Useful reading: Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

EDI Integration

As mentioned previously, the ability to balance product demands from an eCommerce store and supply chain demands is very important. Therefore, to do this would be to empower the eCommerce platform with EDI capabilities, to exchange data in real-time with suppliers and partners.

Useful reading: The most used EDI messages in the supply chain management

Modern Business Solutions

A scalable integrated IT solution, such as the one suggested by EDI2XML, is needed to be able to electronically exchange information by parsing data of different formats, like X12/EDIFACT, XML, CSV or Json, and translate EDI from one format to another. On top of that, the solution should be able to easily integrate with different systems and communicate with different partners using modern and secured communication protocols such as AS2, sFTP or API (Web services).

Improve your eCommerce management and supply chain by implementing and integrating with the best tools and solutions.
Free EDI Consultation

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Integration‎ based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

These days, many companies have very complex and advanced IT infrastructures, numerous applications, ERP and CRM systems, and other business software.

As businesses evolve, corporate information systems become more fragmented.

It is not advisable to simultaneously abandon all outdated information systems and integrate a new one.
In addition, often just one business system cannot satisfy all the needs of a company.

The integration of various heterogeneous solution plays a key role in the corporate IT environment. In most cases, system integration is a forced measure aimed at improving the efficiency of the company’s business processes.

Responding to business needs, software manufacturers are constantly improving integration solutions.

What is Service-oriented architecture (SOA)?
SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a modular approach to software development based on the use of distributed, loosely coupled, replaceable components, and equipped with standardized interfaces for interoperability over standardized protocols.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was introduced in the late 1980s. It was originally presented by CORBA, DCOM, and others. There are several implementations patterns but in fact, SOA can be reduced to a few concepts:
  • Autonomy (independent evolution, scalability, and deployability).
  • User-facing application compatibility.
  • Reuse of business services.
  • Independence from a technology stack

SOA Fundamentals

The basis of SOA is the standardization of relationships between applications. Each system has an “input”, where the initial data is set, and an “output”, on which we get the result of processing this data, thus, these fragments need to be connected into one whole.

The main connecting elements are adapters (connectors) that convert incoming data (service request) and output (service results) into a standard form. Due to this, the application can use as a service a wide variety of “users” (including other applications) and for the convenience reasons, it’s necessary to form the consolidated register with the description of existing services and “rules” of their use (Enterprise Service Bus).

In this way, it is possible to connect to the service only if an adapter has been developed to the corresponding application (or database) that converts incoming / outgoing data into a standard form.

The Integration Platform Magic xpi includes 100+ prebuilt certified adapters for leading IT systems.
The Integration Platform Magic xpi includes 100+ prebuilt certified adapters for leading IT systems.

Read:  How to Choose the Right Integration Platform?

The SOA integration solution is centralized and the Enterprise Service Bus acts as the medium.

An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). (Source: Wikipedia)

All customer services communicate in the same way with the ESB: the ESB translates a message to the correct message type and sends the message to the correct consumer service.
An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications

 

SOA standards

SOA standards have already evolved tremendously, and this happened at all levels:
  1. Modern and diversified adapters
  2. standardization of interoperability through the transport layer
  3. description of business processes

SOA standards have been developed and approved by standardization organizations, which comprise the largest vendors. The expansion of the pool of adapters to the most common industrial applications and databases continues – there are only a few hundred adapters at the moment, and partially integration problems are resolved by the expansion of the standard adapter set.

If there is no ready-to-use adapter to the application used in the enterprise, it can be developed in accordance with already established standards, thus providing the opportunity to integrate this application into the corporate IT environment as a service.

One of the main advantages of using the SOA concept is the rapid response of the information system to changes in business processes. SOA allows you to quickly and with minimal changes rebuild the system to new data manipulation schemes.

EDI2XML Offers a fully reliable SOA, API-driven Integration Solution

For over 21 years, we have been the official partner of the Global software company Magic Software Enterprises Ltd., which provides the Magic xpi integration platform. It’s a fully-trusted SOA and API-based integration platform for enterprise-level integration, business process automation, and data synchronization.

With a wide range of certified and optimized connectors and adapters, Magic xpi integrates ERP, CRM, financial and other systems, such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, and many others.

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Magic xpi Integration SOA platform White paper