Automating Email Reports from QuickBooks

An accounting system is essential for every business to track funds flowing in and out of their business processes. In the not so distant past, bookkeeping was handled through files and registers. File stacks were bundled on office shelves like debris for years, and it was a Herculean task for bookkeepers to check closed accounts. Moreover, keeping papers for such long periods was not practical. The integrity of bookkeeping methods was debated in the early 2000s when instances of massive financial fraud came to light.  Then, the idea of digital bookkeeping was thought to be a myth. Technology birthed the Accounting Renaissance, where digital applications, on premise and cloud replaced papers and files. QuickBooks is one such example, known to small and medium scale businesses across the globe.

Turn the Pages Back

An accounting system developed and managed by Intuit in the early 2000s, QuickBooks started with an on premise DOC version that was installed on either a personal machine or a hosted server. The Digital Wave helped QuickBooks claim a large chunk of small-scale customers, but left gaps in the standard aspects of traditional accounting standards. Then, a series of version updates and patch releases enhanced the product and turned it into a cohesive accounting system. Intuit has integrated QuickBooks with a handful of tools and web applications.

Every Penny Counts

When you are beginning a business, every penny counts. You have to accomplish more with less and ensure you pick the correct tools to operate your business. Most stakeholders need to see reports daily to ensure projects are on schedule.  Accounting tools have different templates for reporting, which can be customized and sent across as pdfs or excel sheets.  The following are some major QuickBooks reports that stakeholders see as critical to their SMB:

·         Profit & Loss Report

·         Balance Sheet

·         A/R Aging Summary

·         A/P Aging Summary

·         General Ledger

Detailing accounting data is complicated. Customers and bookkeepers spend an innumerable amount of hours capturing information and then spend additional hours building out customized reports. To address the restrictions of their product, Intuit created advanced reporting, which is incorporated with QuickBooks Enterprise 14 R6P and higher for those with a functioning Full-Service Plan.

Email the Reports Out

This module helps customers set up a schedule to email reports at the needed frequency (i.e., daily business reports to staff, weekly money-related reports to managers, monthly budget reports to customers).  Generally, not everyone in the company has login access to Accounting systems to view financial statuses, particularly Account Receivables. In this case, scheduled reports are convenient, and can save a ton of time and provide an understanding of the organization's budgetary execution to date. Scheduled reports eventually influence better business choices that can add to future development and achievement. The key benefits of implementing QuickBooks Email Report Automation are:

·         Custom reports

·         Improved productivity

·         Better communication

·         Report compliance

·         Secured accessibility

Automate the Process in a Controlled Way

QuickBooks schedules predefined report templates that contain sensitive financial data that cannot be exposed. Stakeholders and the Accounting Department face the dilemma of segregating the data, so as not to send full reports to all team members. 

QuickBooks doesn’t allow the creation of custom reports or scheduled emails; thus, an intermediary database can do the job. QuickBooks has open APIs for different entities including reports. We at DBSync help our customers integrate QuickBooks with databases and various other cloud and on premise applications. The database, integrated with QuickBooks, can be in line with QuickBooks reports, and required information can be sent across the recipients based on business preferences. DBSync has email connectors that can be used to send emails based on the defined trigger criteria. Your QuickBooks database and email connector can be knitted together in an integration platform for controlled automation of email reporting. This helps when sending QuickBooks reports to selected recipients only.

Conclusion

Data is a crucial factor in driving business decisions. Decision-makers at different levels need to have access to customized reports that save time and effort. Automation of reporting distribution helps make for a sustainable organizational environment where stakeholders can focus on developing the business. 

An accounting system is essential for every business to track funds flowing in and out of their business processes. Technology birthed the Accounting Renaissance, where digital applications, on premise and cloud replaced papers and files. There are many benefits to automate parts of the process like emails..

Choosing the Right Point of Sale (POS) System for your Retail Business

Point-of-Sale systems (POS) have become a “must-have” for any retail store trying to reach the next level in their Line-of-Business. More than twenty (20) years ago, cash registers were used to manage sales. Increasing customer choices and product varieties over the past several decades have demanded more sophisticated electronic options to allow stores to reconcile their stock and transactions automatically.

With the technology boom, Electronic Cash Registers (ECR) -- later termed Point-of-Sale systems -- have become this option, expanding beyond the transaction register to cloud-based POS applications that allow complete control over multiple global retail lines.  Product inventory and sales can be controlled and monitored from any location seamlessly and with full transparency. A simple POS terminal can increase sales exponentially for any retail business by processing customers fast and providing multiple payment options.

For every retailer, selecting the best POS system for their business is a top priority. A few features that every POS should have are:

●     Stock Visibility -- keeping track of product movement can help retailers avoid stock-outs or dead stocks and thus improve customer relationships. A right POS should also keep track of inventory at other branches and provide continuous insights on product sales.

●     Routing the Branch -- keeping customers happy with an eCommerce POS option to process a sale at a different branch (if the product is not available in one department) is an excellent customer satisfaction strategy.

●     Real-time reporting -- the option to generate real-time business reports, based on product sales and inventory data, is one of the key features that every multi-store retailer needs. These reports can also help businesses get rid of extraneous costs.

●     Multichannel Customer Experience -- retailers who manage online stores along with physical stores should have the option in their POS system to provide the same consistent product and pricing information to their customers, whether online or onsite.

●     Integration with 3rd Party Apps -- businesses using POS systems need to make their data available to their ERP and accounting applications. With open API’s, these POS systems can allow integration platforms like DBSync to share the data with various other apps securely, thus avoiding double data entry.

●     Loyalty Programs -- with the smartphone era, modern POS systems are implementing loyalty programs more than ever to keep customers engaged. Customers can download the app instead of swiping or punching cards, to keep track of their purchases and earn reward points. This helps retailers keep track of their customers’ purchases and allow them to serve them better.

●     Data security -- data must be kept secure at all ends. Customer buying patterns and personal info is much more of a concern nowadays. A proper compliance POS system allows retailers to protect customers’ privileges and gain their trust and loyalty.

Several additional factors to consider when selecting a POS are cost, ease of use, and longevity. For multi-channel retailers who sell online and in physical spaces, applications like Shopify POS and Vend meet the above criteria. These POS applications not only allow retailers to manage sales, they even help in doing multichannel eCommerce by connecting to various eCommerce channels like Amazon, Big Commerce, and Walmart, thus increasing their presence around the globe. Moreover, these applications allow integration with various 3rd party applications for shipping and accounting process with the help of open API's. DBSync, a pioneer in the field, allows for seamless integration, providing complete control over the business and optimizing sales. 

Retailers must adhere to specific standards when selecting POS systems, keeping in mind that the perfect marriage of POS with eCommerce is the key to running a successful retail business in the future.

Multichannel Ecommerce – Benefits, Challenges and Opportunities

Shopping online is one of the most popular activities on the Web. A person can shop anytime or anywhere–even in pajamas! Webpages are built to promote specific goods and services that can be purchased online and delivered to a personal/professional setting. Over the past ten (10) years, eCommerce has grown in leaps and bounds, particularly with the rise of companies that allow electronic transactions, such as eBay and Amazon. 

Nowadays, it is common for companies to have a significant online presence, mainly “brick and mortar” stores, where multichannel eCommerce gives customers the ability to: 

• Search through an extensive database of products and services and build their orders over several days
• Compare pricing for the same product over dozens of channels and choose the best one. 

An eCommerce multichannel is where different groups of people sell goods/services in different ways at different times. The goal is to satisfy as many people as possible while continually scaling to increasing traffic. There can be several challenges with this approach: 

To avoid such hurdles, businesses often choose a single platform to publish and manage their product and service lines, such as Shopify, ChannelAdvisor, and Seller Active. This platform provides a central place to trade products, reach out to more communities all over the world, and receive revenue in common currency. Often these platforms are used to sell and manage products/services, but additional applications can be added to process shipping and backorders. Apps like Shipstation and Ecomdash allow vendors to fulfill their orders by direct shipping and order processing options, or using shipping gateways like UPS and FedEx. 

Based on the product and service verticals, these sellers can be divided into two categories: 

B2C merchants have direct reach to customers and thus have to strictly maintain their product portfolio, as customer buying patterns are based on product reviews and past experiences with the seller. B2B merchants, on the other hand, have to provide merchants’ orders on time and thus have to maintain their delivery portfolio diligently. ECommerce platforms for both types of sellers are the same, but utilization is different. Most of the B2C and B2B merchants use an integrated web of applications to manage their day-to-day operations. A typical example would be:

The applications vary from merchant to merchant — B2C often go for the cheaper option while B2B go for ERP’s, which have all of the above capabilities. These applications provide an efficient way to complete operations on multichannel eCommerce platforms, as the integrated platform automates data sharing and reduces manual intervention to maintain product stock.

DBSync, a pioneer iPaas for a multichannel eCommerce, provides actionable information towards customer and product repletion statuses. Most IPaaS’ fail when it comes to a full cycle integration, and thus B2B merchants tend to go with fully optimized and integrated ERP. However, not all ERP’s support of all channels, so merchants end up with a simplified, integrated solution. 

DBSync is a leading player in this vertical, as its’ pre-built connectors for applications like ChannelAdvisor, Shopify and Shipstation, can be used to build connections to other similar domain apps using the Swagger framework. 

CSEs (Comparison Shopping Engines)

The battle for most retailers today is to create brand awareness for their product/service. Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) like Google Shopping, Nextag and Connexity allow customers to compare product lines over multiple eCommerce channels. NOTE: A fee is required to have a product appear in top search results. 

Most retailers struggle to set their multichannel strategies and thus fail to reach their target audience. Some companies like ChannelAdvisor and GoDataFeed have options to simplify this process. They provide Feed Campaign Management and optimize product listing ads for digital marketers, providing them with a centralized platform to enhance their product content, overcome unprofitable products automatically and provide actionable insights to grow their product line bidding.

Conclusion:

The fast-growing eCommerce industry is trending towards growing the customer base rather than the number of channels. Hence, retailers/sellers have to focus their Multichannel Marketing Strategy to ensure repeat customers. 

The ability to “tag” products based on user preferences (via Web and mobile browsing) and make them available on social media has been a game-changer, as customers no longer have to leave social media channels to purchase a product/service. Retailers can also invest in CSEs to ensure their product/service reaches its targeted community. This can increase search listings and allow movement towards Omni channel marketing.

DBSync, as a unified integration platform, can play a crucial role in making B2B sellers’ businesses grow beyond their expectations by optimizing order processing and fulfillment and exposing them to the global eCommerce web.

Role of Data Integration in Data Analytics

When making important decisions, people often recommend “going with your gut.” For today’s data engineers and scientists, this “gut feeling” is not enough–it’s all about the data.

The explosion of data-capturing technology has created a Big Data phenomenon – an entirely new class of data analytic tools and techniques that allows business users and analysts to become data analysts. However, with data spread across multiple systems and platforms (such as OnPremise and OnCloud), one cannot make use of these dynamic data analytic tools/techniques until the information is integrated.  

DBSync’s Cloud WorkFlow Enterprise–a mature and fully-featured Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) built for the cloud as well as OnPremise systems–is the integration answer. Through its comprehensive, cutting-edge framework and architecture, it enables business users and technical analysts to accelerate analytics through various platforms like Redshift and other cloud warehouses. DBSync’s iPaaS collects data from multiple sources in the front, middle and back offices, and feeds it into the data analytics systems. Unlike other heavy OnPremise legacy tools, DBSync can integrate data across platforms, solving the common problem of having disconnected, channel-specific systems in place that work well in their closed environment, but completely fail when used together with other channel or cloud systems.

Unified View

DBSsync combines ease of use, sophisticated transformations, extensions for on-premises, and cloud integration with a managed list of close to 30 different systems called “DBSync connectors.” Integrating data from various sources into a single, unified view has never been more straightforward. As with any integration solution, integration begins with the ingestion process and includes steps such as cleansing, ETL mapping, and transformation. This type of integration ultimately enables analytics tools to produce useful, actionable business intelligence with a constant feed of data, on a “real-time” or timely basis. 

Data Governance

Analytics performed on top of incorrect data yields incorrect results – this can be detrimental in the quest to operationalize innovation. Data governance is of primary concern to IT organizations charged with maintaining the consistency of data routinely accessed by citizen data scientists and citizen integrator populations. Gartner estimates that only 10% of self-service BI initiatives are governed to prevent inconsistencies that adversely affect the business.

Data discovery initiatives that use desktop analytics tools risk creating inconsistent silos of data. Cloud data warehouses afford increased governance and data centralization. DBSync helps to ensure robust data governance by replicating source tables into Redshift clusters, where the data can be synchronized at any time interval desired, from real-time to overnight batches. In this way, data drift is eliminated, allowing all users who access data (whether in Redshift or other enterprise systems), to be confident in its accuracy.

Use Cases and Challenges when Building an Integrated Accounting System

We are currently living in a “data revolution” where just about any desired data point can be quantified. For Accounting and ERP management, the question becomes: how useful is such an opportunity if data is inaccessible and/or spread across multiple platforms? In this blog, I will use a storyboard approach to summarize my experiences and demonstrate the challenges I faced integrating SAGE 100 and 300 systems.

Integration is Important

Integrated accounting and financial systems enable businesses to rely on real-time information about business transactions. For example, the operator of a small hotel business can remotely track the number of vacant rooms, occupied rooms, and new reservations; simultaneously track gift shop sales and latest inventory records; access real-time reports of the day’s operations and analyze the impact of transactions on the general ledger.

One-Stop Shop

An integrated accounting system serves as a “one-stop-shop” for all accounting information, including financial, managerial and cash-flow accounting. As such, when using an integrated accounting system, maintaining separate accounting procedures for preparing financial, management and cash-flow reports is not necessary.

Real-Time Information

Stand-alone accounting is never in “real-time”, as it requires someone to manually take information from the ordering system and re-enter it in the accounting system. This means that financial information required for strong decision making is not up to date. Data re-entry further invites human error, leading to a greater chance of making decisions based on faulty information.

Integrated accounting provides a complete real-time picture of the business at any time, as information automatically flows into the accounting system as orders are processed. A web-based business management system with integrated accounting allows for complete and accurate financials that can easily be transported.

Integration Process

DBSync seamlessly integrates various applications with Sage 100 and 300 ERP to “push and pull” data including product details, inventory levels, payment and shipping, customer information, sales orders, and status updates. The information exchanged is securely and automatically synchronized between Sage 300 ERP and any other target system.

SAGE 100 INTEGRATION:  

It is important to note that both DBSync Cloud agent or OnPrem service can be used to integrate with SAGE. A user is able to install any ODBC driver on his/her local server (preferably a 32-bit driver). An attempt should be made to supply values for the driver using the available fields as shown in the image above. If it is discovered that a “Test Connection” is unsuccessful then it may be necessary to create a manual connection string that is specific to the newly installed ODBC. Once the ODBC connected to DBSync staging server is established, we make use of SAGE Visual Integrator to make a connection with our staging server through the ODBC bridge.

A typical Visual Integrator (VI) import job making a connection to our ODBC to import Sales Orders into SAGE is illustrated below:

Figure 1.

• Once you are at the SAGE homepage, navigate to Visual Integrator and expand Import Job Maintenance or Export Job Maintenance (depending on if you are bringing data into SAGE or exporting data from SAGE).

• The No.2 in the above screenshot illustrates a typical SAGE sales order mapping through a VI job with DBSync staging ODBC server to bring data sales orders into the SAGE system.

SAGE 300 INTEGRATION:

There are two ways to integrate with SAGE 300 using DBSync. One option is to go via the SQL Server connector route, which uses the DBSync database adapter. The other way is through DBSync Swagger adapter. The Swagger adapter is the preferred route as SAGE 300 provides integrator through Swagger UI. The Sage 300 Web API makes it easy to develop services that integrate with Sage 300 data and business logic. The Web API can be used to create integrated services for Sage 300 using many frameworks and tools—including just a web browser. Swagger UI generates visual and dynamic documentation of the Sage 300 Web API endpoints and their models. It can be used to support verbs for endpoint paths. The defaulted company for these operations is SAMLTD. To access the Swagger JSON document and Swagger UI page, navigate to <<protocol>>://<<servername/Sage300WebApi>>, where the protocol is HTTP or HTTPS and server name is the name of your Sage 300 server (for example, https://localhost/Sage300WebApi). Swagger is part of the Open API Initiative (OAI). For more information on open API/Swagger and Swagger UI, please see:

where the protocol is HTTP or HTTPS and server name is the name of your Sage 300 server (for example, https://localhost/Sage300WebApi). Swagger is part of the Open API Initiative (OAI). For more information on open API/Swagger and Swagger UI, please see:

• http://swagger.io
• https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification

Relevant Use-Cases 

Over a period of time, many use-cases and data-flows have leveraged DBsync iPaaS.  The most prominent and relevant SAGE integrations asked for and in play, are:

Order to Cash:

The most typical use-case or automation that is seen with any CRM & Accounting integration is Order-To-Cash or Quote-To-Cash data-flow. Here, CRM systems like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM typically become the system of record or a master database for all sales and marketing processes that drives the integration for all customer and order information. Once the orders are placed in the CRM and an Opportunity is “Closed Won”, the sale is accounted for by integrating the Opportunity/Order and all related information (Customer, Customer’s BillTo and ShipTo, Product into SAGE receivables). The integration also includes the creation of Customer, Product attributes since these records do not pre-exist. This prevents double data entry of Customer and Product attributes. Lastly, the ‘transaction insert’ operation is executed, constituting of Quotes, Sales Order, Invoices and Sales Receipts. The relevant transaction data flow can be activated within DBSync depending on the requirements or business use case.

A typical CRM Object to SAGE Entity data flow mapping is illustrated below:

CRM	Sync Direction	SAGE 100 / 300
Accounts	🡪	Customer
Opportunity / Order	🡪	Quotes /SO / Invoices / Receipts
Product	🡪	Product
Payments	🡨	AR Payments
A/R Reporting	🡨	A/R

Inventory Management & Movement

Inventory Management, Movement and Tracking is one of the most complex and difficult automation in the integration business. It can be the Achilles heel for lots of business who have inventories in multiple locations. As SOs and POs are generated, it becomes paramount to track inventory items’ movements and stock-on-hand updates. Typically in these scenarios, the SAGE or Accounting presides over the other system and more often than not becomes the master database. The incremental updates that are taking place in SAGE need to be reflected in your CRM so the end-user/rep knows stock availability before an order is placed. This particular use-case is very relevant today, as reps/service technicians are in the field with hand-held devices and require continuous real-time integration. Automation has increased stock visibility across the board to our customers, and in some cases has not only has reduced operational hazards but has also reduced billing cycles from several weeks to a matter of days. 

A typical mapping between CRM and SAGE tracking inventory can be seen below:

CRM	Sync Direction	SAGE 100 / 300
Warehouse / Locations	🡨	Locations
PriceBook	🡨	PriceBooks
Product	🡨	Products
Inventory	🡨	Inventory

Other notable automation/integrations with SAGE are AP Automation, Project Management, and Payroll Integrations. Please continue to stay connected for more insightful and detailed discussions on some of the more popular integrations that can be done with SAGE 100 or SAGE 300 systems.

Working with Amazon S3 Using DBSync

What is Amazon S3

Amazon simple storage service is storage for the internet. Amazon S3 has a simple web service interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any user access to the highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its global network of websites.

Working With Amazon S3 Bucket

To upload your data (photos, videos, documents, and more), you first create a bucket in one of the AWS regions. You can then upload any number of objects to the bucket.

In terms of implementation, buckets and objects are resources, and Amazon S3 provides APIs for you to manage them. For example, you can create a bucket and upload objects using Amazon s3 API. You can also use the Amazon S3 API. You can also use Amazon s3 console to perform these operations. The console internally uses Amazon S3 APIs to send requests to Amazon s3.

Amazon S3 Connector Via DBSync

Amazon S3 Connector is built to connect to the Amazon S3 Cloud storage for Transferring of various sensitive data like files, directory systems from and into S3 Cloud storage system. DBSync Amazon S3 Connector supports four kinds of operations

1. Upload File: Facilitate reading of file from the local file system and writing to the Amazon S3 Cloud storage.
2. Upload Directory: Facilitate reading of designated directory from the local file system and writing to the Amazon S3 Cloud storage.
3. Download File: Facilitate reading of file from Amazon S3 Cloud storage and writing to the local file system.
4. Download Directory: Facilitate reading of designated directory from Amazon S3 Cloud storage and writing to the local file system.

The use-case described in the tutorial section will help you all to understand better how it benefits for your automation needs and reap benefits by decreasing the manual intervention for data backup.

If you want to transfer, sync or backup files from one cloud service to a database, are you going to manually do it by downloading files to your local disk and re-uploading to your database? Is a better way to do it, right? We recommend DBSync solution to help you backup, sync and move files from Database to Amazon S3

Step1: We have to connect DBSync to the database from where you want to export the files. For more information on what and how databases can be connected can be obtained from the below link. http://help.mydbsync.com/docs/display/dbsync/Database.

Step 2: We have to connect DBSync with Amazon S3 storage, you will need to enter specific information so that the DBSync can communicate with Amazon S3. so you will need the following.

• Bucket Name
• Access Key ID
• Secret Access Key

Here is the link to rightly configure the Amazon s3 connector to help you connected with the DBSync.

http://help.mydbsync.com/docs/display/dbsync/Amazon+S3

Step3: Now it’s that all the connections are set between DBSync and Source, Target applications. We will have to create the Project, Process, and workflow in the DBSync, After those are done you will need to do the mapping which will help DBSync to understand from where to where the files have to be moved.

Step 4: Hit the Run Now button located at the top right corner of the page as shown in the above screen. If sync is successfully executed it shows up in the console, in case of errors also same will be displayed in the console. After the successful completion of sync, go to the Amazon S3 storage to the given file path to check files are copied along with correct directory name, file names, and data in the files.

Here are some of the wiki links of how DBSync allows the user to connect with the Amazon S3 connector and a tutorial that can help the working mode of the DBSync Amazon S3 Connector.

http://help.mydbsync.com/docs/display/dbsync/Amazon+S3

http://help.mydbsync.com/docs/display/dbsync/File+System++To++Amazon+S3

Kindly leave us a comment in or Contact us, case of queries, thoughts or recommendations, one of our representatives will get in touch if our product offering interest you.

Web-References :

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Welcome.html

How Business Automation Is Shaping Digital Transformation for Retail Industry

Business automation is usually a function of how fast a company is growing or maturing. Customers are moving from old desktop/server apps with limited connectivity into more modern apps with APIs enabled.

Now it’s more a “must have” rather than “nice to have.” APIs are built for improving automation and user experience, and it’s already happening. To give an example, Salesforce gets more API transactional traffic than from Browser or mobile UI.

Manual updating is at its peril: Scale-up

Manual updating and reconciling between systems will not sustain long-term growth. Think Facebook – if they had to approve or set up each person joining Facebook, where would they be? You get the point. If businesses want to move fast, they need to get manual steps out of the process.

Scaling up is the best way to compete.  It requires focusing the team’s efforts on growth, not maintaining current operations.  Also, the more there are links in the chain, the more it is prone to break, and this is even truer when humans are involved.
Businesses must take their team and let them spend that time creatively, figuring out how to take the company to the next level.  

A market tendency towards SaaS or Cloud-based applications

Software implementation helps to improve processes, not merely map current processes into the new software. It takes a little more time but is worth it.  We do see trends that clients who focus on getting the processes in place scale much faster.

The growth of Cloud is undoubtedly tremendous.
The tendency towards cloud-based applications came mostly from the years of heartache caused by on-site servers.

We also see the growth of eCommerce as integral. Earlier, warehouse data was used for internal purposes only. But now when a scan happens, that data is automatically reflected publicly to the whole world.

Software as a Service has inherently built-in demand for increasingly complex integration. If you have two SaaS apps, you have two integration points. If you have three SaaS apps, you have six integration points.

Evolution of Business Automation

Automation is evolving.

First, it was getting an application to expose APIs, then came orchestration of business processes.

The third phase would be intelligent automation, where business processes learn and adapt over some time. Much work has been done, and there is a lot to be done.

To improve process automation, it takes planning, implementation, and usually a bit of back and forth.  As technologies evolve, time to execute process automation tends to decrease and will continue to do so.  

Let’s compare an EDI setup to API integration.  API integration takes a fraction of the time, breaks less often, and is much faster to fix. It will continue to improve and speed up.  It only means that the time and cost to execute will become trivial.

All of our time and efforts can be spent on the planning stage, substantially increasing and speeding up our iterations, therefore speeding up our improvements, growth, and success.

Industry trends towards Business Automation

Two of the most talked about trends are – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain.

While Blockchain is still trying to find a foothold and would take some time, AI is getting embedded in all parts of our lives, many of what we don’t even notice.

Businesses should start actively looking at AI on all aspects of what they do, including business process automation and often reducing manual labor. In a recent article, it was mentioned that there is a shortage of candidates, and many jobs are going unfilled.

With current immigration policies, it is to get worse, and this is where we feel businesses need to start thinking about removing manual work.
Digital integration and AI to play an active role in most software we build.

In the retail industry, retailers are moving towards private labels versus reselling models.
This is happening as the MAP becomes more prevalent, and brands themselves are going direct.  

With this, we see a lot of blurring of the traditional supply chain lines and an increase in 3PL as retailers compete with Amazon’s standards.
As the supply chain consolidates, EDI will die out. We can have fast, easy, stable, and inexpensive integrations that achieve standards with APIs instead.

Best Practices for organizations to implement Business Automation

Disciplined approach with Data: Flourish or perish

Focusing on business automation will enable organizations to compete in the digital age.  Companies that start down this path now are the ones that will survive over the next 5-10 years, but also are the ones who will thrive.

One of the things we notice with our most successful clients is that they pay attention to the data and use it to gain critical insights.
Companies beat out their competition over time with data insights. Getting the ideas and having the systems to execute them with pig-headed discipline is the key.

Transform error-prone manual approach into automation

Companies should look at each of their processes and manual touchpoints. Then to figure out which touchpoints are causing the most pain or error.
They can use Six Sigma or other methods to identify errors within business processes.

Take the one that is most impactful and automate it and then move to the next. I don’t mind going slow as long as organizations are tackling those process hiccups first that cause the most pain.

Why businesses need to work towards Digital Transformation and Integration

Businesses that are thinking digital today are the ones going to succeed in the future.
Many traditional retailers have already started their digital transformation, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is an absolute necessity to have their systems work together seamlessly along with their suppliers’ and clients’ system. Not to mention capturing the data and getting the insights are also needed to decimate the competition.

There are two camps of thought.

Purchase an all-inclusive package to run your business end to end

Or,

Get the best of breed application.

While most “all inclusive” ERP packages are well integrated, companies have started to look for the best of the breed.
With this type of integration, they can maximize productivity for their businesses and minimize risks with vendor lock-in.
For example, Salesforce is mostly chosen for CRM,  even if the businesses have SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft. When organizations are looking at such business architectures, they need to be digitally integrated and provide their end customers a seamlessly integrated experience.

How automation has changed the way of work

Our client’s focus shift from maintaining the business to working on growing the business. When you have your systems and processes set up, then you have the framework or scaleup.  As you scale up, your systems can hopefully adapt to the change, but you will need to either update processes within your system as you grow or upgrade to ones that can scale with you.
It’s like hiring. Hire for the size you are now and will realistically be soon, but you always want some room for growth. The lucky part is that the right systems could take you through more business phases than a person usually can.   

Conclusion

From a software vendor standpoint, our goal is to “delight” our customers.
Our vision focuses around improving visibility and efficiencies in the supply chain. There are still lots of inefficiencies that we see in day-to-day activities that we will be working hard to eliminate.  Companies that take the customer feedback loop to heart will partner with similar companies, and these alliances will improve the experience of end consumers exponentially.

All-in-one software systems will struggle as best of breed becomes the norm again.  Throughout the past, the software has seen a few cycles from the best of a kind to the all-in-one.

Today, the ease of system integrations matched with stability dominates. We will see all-in-one systems that are hard to use, expensive, and impossible to set up, slowly die off even for large enterprises.

Why You Need a Cloud Integration Platform

As Organizations move past their underlying Software as a Service (SaaS) systems, they perceive the expanding need to incorporate information and procedures between the open cloud and their on-premises databases and applications. The pain point was the development cost of creating the entire design of the middleware to connect one to another and of course, security. Identifying the gap, many vendors have moved to address the issue.

Most Organizations, when they buy a SaaS solution, start looking into the possibility of connecting the system to their existing IT environment. It could be a CRM to an Accounting system or an ERP system to a database. The complexity of the integration varies with the type of business domain and the number of systems they use.

It started with connectors rendering the open APIs of systems. Contrasted with the single “connectors” that sellers create to empower integration, cloud integration platforms are increasingly programmable and progressively adaptable to deal with not just one system but with a more extensive arrangement of off the rack applications. Here a large grouping of custom applications is created inside one environment. Thus, you utilize a platform that can be connected to meet the requirements of multiple systems.

The cloud integration platforms gain importance when the SaaS solutions or applications become popular and when cross-functional processes need to exchange data among several disparate on-premises and SaaS offerings. Moreover, many applications are offloaded to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. The integration has to be contained in the circle of an enterprise’s overall business strategy, processes, and operations. Progressively, they should fit into a prior domain and potentially interoperate with extra SaaS or On-premise applications that may be added to that condition.

Who are there in the market?

There are two types of vendors in the segment:

• Vendors who are very specific to data integration or middleware market For eg: DBSync a middleware technology used for data and application integration
• Vendors who started as a cloud application

Regardless of the type of vendors, nowadays most of technology can run on-premises, cloud or both. It’s winding up progressively prevalent to build up the integration in the cloud, at that point run it on-premises or in the cloud, at that point report back to an administrator console for execution monitoring, which can be either on-premises or in the cloud.

Run your Cloud Integration Platform:

One of the key benefits in running Cloud Integration Platform is less hassle of running an application from clients server utilizing the on-premise resources, including installing the platform and managing the integration process. If the use case is the connection between two cloud application, Cloud Integration platform is the best option. In a hybrid environment, the cloud platform services will call the service APIs running on the ground. E.g., web connector in QuickBooks. The value proposition is more than ever that; they need to be able to fit into a pre-existing environment and possibly interoperate with new SaaS apps that might be added to that environment.

Conclusion:

It’s imperative for IT groups to seriously investigate the alternatives a particular seller offers, which is primarily on platform capabilities. The second is a way of deployment which should address the compatibility questions. The last but essential is packages and pricing associated.

You can learn more about various apps offered by DBSync here

Data Integration for HR Performance Review Applications

HR Performance Review, at its core, is to review the performance for the past review period and more importantly, set the goals/expectation for the forthcoming review period. Often the essential and critical second part of the performance review is not performed because people get stuck with the first part and disagree on the results and performance grading. The performance review time is often painful for both employees and managers alike. This leads to willful postponing of the review by both parties and done at the last minute hastily is often poorly documented.

Sounds familiar, this is a common scenario on both corporates and start-up world. There are a lot of tools available for managing the HR Performance Review. Integrating these tools with the core customer relationship/work/task/Account management tools/software and other tools used to carry out the needed tasks to achieve the goals will help to navigate the Performance Reviews smoothly.

Why there are disagreements in Performance Review

• No or not clear goals/objectives set in the first place
• No intermediate performance reviews – The manager and the employee discuss the objectives and results at the end of the review period and there was no chance to alleviate any differences early
• Lack of Candid feedback – We as humans generally lack the skill of objective feedback giving on the goals that have not been met. We often think that such feedback is negative and demotivates the other person. We would like to sugar coat the feedback with other stuff. The problem is we are not helping the other person, actually, we are causing damage to their careers. The other person has spent considerable effort on this task and they deserve to know the feedback. The earlier we provide the feedback, it will be good for them to learn and adapt.
• Another main reason is the lack of data. Most of the time the results for the review period is subjective and not quantitative. This might be because
• The data is not readily available
• No time to collect/prepare the data even when data is available
• No common perspective on the results (The manager says it’s half empty and the employee says it’s half full)
• Remuneration changes always at the back of the mind.

What we can do

• Set SMART goals
• S – Specific, Stretch
• M – Measurable, Meaningful, Motivational:
• A – Achievable, Attainable, Accepted, Agreed upon
• R – Realistic, Relevant, Reasonable, Rewarding, Results-oriented
• T – Time-Based

Most of the problems can be solved by setting SMART goals. Spend a reasonable amount of time in setting the goal and most importantly, get the agreement from the employees. The critical part of SMART is time bound. The lesser or more granular will be more helpful. Having multiple goal setting might be a problem, and most companies now agree that three months is a perfect period for goal setting.

• Always have a parent goal – Every goal should be linked to organizational goals. This is to make sure all the goals are meaningful and in relation to an organization directive.
• Midterm reviews – Have at least one or more mid-term reviews.
• When setting up the goal, both the manager and the employee might have agreed on the goals but there might be some criteria/scenario overlooked and needs tweaking.
• There might be a change in the business direction and hence there might be a change in the objective.
• Make sure the employee is making progress in the right direction
• To see if the employee need any help
• The final review and rating is not a surprise
• Data Centric – The performance review should evolve itself.
• Build your key business management, work/task management tools, and other similar tools with also Performance Review in mind. We should be able to extract data/dashboards/reports from them which should be indicative of the employee performance. Such data helps in
• Avoid misinterpretation
• A common scale to measure all employees
• The employee understands they stand and no arguments
• Documenting results becomes easy and automated
• Separate the Performance Review into 2 parts
• There will be a remuneration part associated with the review. There will be arguments because the performance review/rating is associated with that. We can separate the review into 2 parts
• The first one on the feedback for the past review part and most importantly the goals/objectives for the forthcoming period
• The second one is on remuneration and can be done separately at a different time.

How Data Integration can help

We are from DBSync, so data integration to improve business is core to our mission. We are market leaders in integrating the cloud and on-prem applications. Integrating your business and work management applications with the performance review process/tools will help you in a long way in

• Setting clear objectives which the employees could relate to and will breathe in, day in and day out. The goals/objectives should be relevant to the job and responsibility of the employee. The integration helps in setting the goals and even refer or relate to the key business objectives. The goals or in other words in the same terminology which your employees understand.
• Define key metrics as evaluation criteria. Integrating the performance indicators with key business metrics helps everyone understand the progress they are making and how it contributes to the overall business.
• Keeps the team focused – Automatically calculating the Key Performance Indicators/Performance metrics, comparing them with the goals and notifying the team appropriately will keep the team well aware of what has been achieved and how much more has to be done to reach goals. This awareness keeps the team focused on achieving the goals
• For example, DBSync can integrate your HRIS system and your ticketing system (JIRA for example). If you have on time resolution or SLA Adherence defined as a Key Performance Indicator, DBSync can help fetch the current performance level against the goals and it will be very helpful for the team to know how they are doing against their business goals and also for their supervisor to know any deviations very early and mentor/manage the team back to the right ways.
• No result documentation – Since the key metrics are integrated, there is very less effort in documenting the results.
• Continuous Evaluation – The results are open and viewable to everyone involved. It is available all the time and helps in making the necessary adjustments.
• All are on the same page – No explanations or discussions needed to understand the results. The results are interpreted in the same way by everyone

We would like to help

Set SMART goals and enable your HR performance review to get the business results from your business applications. This will help in the smooth and purposeful performance review process and achieve its goal of aligning everyone to the organization objectives. We at DBSync help organizations integrate the cloud and on-prem applications. We can certainly help in integrating your business applications with your performance review process/tools.