Many entrepreneurs are making the switch to enterprise application integration because of its immense benefits. When a business begins to expand, it is essential that it works on increasing productivity while streamlining its operations. To achieve both, the business must adopt enterprise applications.

Some of the most popular software applications that businesses use include business analytics, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management software. Communication across these different platforms is the key to reducing administrative delays and inefficiencies in business processes. The easiest way to solve this problem is through EAI.

What is Enterprise Application Integration?

Enterprise Application Integration, popularly known as EAI, is a process that helps to unite workflows and databases associated with different business applications. Through this unification, businesses can consistently use relevant information to increase productivity and improve efficiency.

We can also define EAI as the implementation of a set of technologies to facilitate communication across different enterprise applications. It acts as a middleware framework to ensure the free flow of data across applications while avoiding alterations to the applications or their database configurations. The end product of using EAI is an increase in data availability and a more streamlined process.

Why Implement EAI?

Many businesses invest in an array of software products purchased from different vendors. They use these applications to handle their daily operations. While this is great, it may result in data silos that can lead to duplication across databases or data inconsistency. Asides from this, users may have to consult each of the applications to access data for daily operations, which is time and effort-consuming.

With EAI, you have a framework that facilitates the sharing of workflows and data across these applications. As such, you can eliminate human errors and reduce manual steps as much as possible. These present you with improved insight into your organization’s data to facilitate increased efficiency. From this, it becomes evident that an organization needs to implement EAI as it expands.

How EAI Works

The first thing we must address is the way we perceive enterprise application implementation. Rather than view it as a framework or specific tool, it should be viewed as an ideal or goal that an organization seeks to achieve.

Each organization that adopts EAI can work with it at a different level. It could either be at the level of all its applications sharing workflows and common data. On the other hand, it could be at the point of having its applications exist independently. To be realistic, many businesses are never at either extreme, they fall somewhere in the middle. This is because businesses are constantly evolving.

With EAI, you don’t need anyone to reprogram the applications. Instead, businesses work with APIs or middleware to ensure that their applications work in tandem. EAI then makes it easy to swap applications based on current business needs. It achieves this with the need for large-scale system re-designs or a significant impact on productivity.

Let’s Help Make the Transition

Are you looking at adopting Enterprise Application Integration at your business? Adept Engineering Solutions has over 25 years of experience in this field and we can guide you through the process. Reach out to us today to get started.