Source of this article: Yunshuzhi Observation
If there is no "integration", the financial accounting work of the enterprise is likely to be Mission Impossible (task that cannot be completed)!
In a provincial tobacco company, more than 900 financial personnel were originally engaged in accounting work. After the online integration of its financial software with 17 banks, bank receipts and documents in the financial system realized automatic generation, automatic reconciliation, and automatic association , automatic filing, etc. In the year of production, 180 financial personnel were reduced, and the proportion of the remaining financial accounting workload was also reduced from 70% to 20%. Financial personnel freed from repetitive affairs can devote more energy Invest in financial management and control, decision support, etc., which are of great benefit to promoting business operations.
The above examples show that: first, integration work is the "just need" of every enterprise; second, making good use of integration can help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency; third, only the coordination and unification of internal management and external collaboration can integrate Maximize value.
Since integration is so important and necessary, why is it not obvious in the long process of enterprise informatization evolution? The reason is that the previous integration is mainly biased towards the integration within the enterprise, which can be realized through the specifications defined between the internal systems of the enterprise, and once the integration is completed, it is fixed. Today, with the acceleration of the pace of cloud migration and the expansion of the scale of enterprises, especially the advent of the era of social business, enterprises must not only quickly respond to internal needs, adjust business direction, but also well connect external resources and expand the boundaries of enterprise capabilities. , more complex and diverse social integration becomes the focus. In short, both the connotation and extension of integration have changed, and integration has become a hurdle that enterprises must overcome in their digital transformation.
In the just-concluded Yonyou BIP Technology Conference, Yonyou showed the outside world the Yonyou BIP-iuap platform that understands enterprise business better, and released a comprehensive digital intelligence capability system to help enterprises upgrade the digital intelligence base and accelerate the advancement of digital intelligence. . Among them, YonLinker, the connection integration platform, is one of the indispensable platforms among the three major platforms of UFIDA iuap. At the meeting, YonLinker showed the latest connection integration service system of UFIDA iuap, from integration tools to integration assets, helping enterprises to better connect internal External resources and capabilities expand business boundaries and operations, and help companies upgrade their digital and intelligent bases from the perspective of connection and integration to better realize business innovation.
In the era of social commerce, an enterprise needs to connect not only all its internal systems, but also all enterprise-related applications in the society, which requires its business and partners to be able to conduct business online and conduct transactions online. This is the core of " Business Online, Start with Connection " put forward by Yonyou Connection Integration Services .
There are two main focus points of UFIDA's connection integration service. First, build a unified integrated cloud market for UFIDA . Second, two forms of integration have been constructed, one is integration, which integrates all ecology , and the other is integrated, opening up the ecosystem of UFIDA , allowing external ecological manufacturers to connect to all UFIDA products with one click, and ten thousand in the top ten fields An API to empower customers.
Connection Integration "Shift Left"
The needs of real-time business, as well as the development of technologies such as intelligence, make enterprises less and less tolerant of "after the fact" behavior. Therefore, in many subdivided fields such as security and operation and maintenance, the concept of "left shift" has gradually been recognized and accepted by more and more enterprises.
"In the past, many of the internal management of the enterprise were post-event systems, such as the account system, which simply reflected the business operations and recorded them." Cheng Jinhu, general manager of the high-end BG connection and integration division of UFIDA Network, changed the subject, "But now, many Business processing is real-time, such as a purchase, purchase and payment in one go, unlike before, after the purchase is completed, the purchase order needs to be entered in the system, and after the payment is completed, another payment order is recorded in the system. Frequent manual intervention is required, which not only consumes a lot of manpower, but is also prone to errors. Customers' strong demand for online business puts forward higher requirements for modern integration."
To some extent, modern integration is also a kind of "integration left shift". It is not an after-the-fact record, but a real-time synchronization with the business, which can also be said to change from passive to active. So, what new challenges does this modern business-driven integration bring?
First of all, the business of an enterprise happens online in real time, and integration has become a part of the business . Therefore, the requirements for integration reliability and integration links have undergone fundamental changes. They can no longer be achieved through low-quality R&D as before, but require a highly reliable, operable integration platform that can follow business changes in real time.
Secondly, the most notable feature or change of modern integration is social integration . The social integration products that an enterprise needs to connect with are provided by various manufacturers, with many categories and different integration specifications. The systems of OA vendors, e-commerce companies, and even banks that enterprises connect with may be changed and upgraded at any time. If the enterprise's integrated platform cannot meet demand, it may cause business interruption.
Finally, we have entered the era of cloud computing, and cloud services themselves are standardized, normalized, and productized. To meet this need, integration should be further standardized, normalized, and productized, and the new model of "integration + operation" will provide convenience for the operation of enterprises .
Integration has always been a core business of UFIDA . With the gradual evolution of integration concept and technology, UFIDA integration platform and business are also advancing with the times. At first, the ESB provided by UFIDA was mainly used for internal integration of enterprises. Today, in order to meet the needs of social business innovation, Yonyou has innovatively launched the connection integration platform YonLinker, which can support the establishment of standard and standardized integration models for enterprises, provide cloud integration design centers, share integration assets, and achieve continuous supply and operation. .
Different from professional integration manufacturers, Yonyou, as a mainstream enterprise service provider, adheres to the principle of open integration of its own assets. On the one hand, it opens up and empowers its core financial, supply chain, procurement and other capabilities to ecological partners, so that They can better integrate with UFIDA's systems and products; on the other hand, because of the needs of business development, UFIDA also hopes to connect and integrate with more partners. For example, UFIDA's procurement system needs to be integrated with sourcing suppliers. The marketing system needs to be integrated with e-commerce, etc. "In the process of two-way integration, UFIDA should contribute and open up its core assets and core APIs." Cheng Jinhu said.
From integration tools to integration assets
In the era of ERP, Yonyou's ESB is just a plug-in of its ERP platform, not a mandatory option. Because UFIDA ERP itself is a complete management suite, it does not have a strong need for integration. Traditional integration is usually carried out by project, and the quality of integration often depends on people. Because many integrations are developed and completed on the project site, the ability of developers determines the quality of integration to a certain extent. This integration mode is non-standardized, non-replicable, and often unstable and unreliable, for example, connections will be interrupted, data will be out of sync or duplicated, and so on. This has a huge impact on business documents and may cause irreparable financial losses.
"Entering the BIP stage, an important change in the business of enterprises is socialized interconnection, or socialized collaboration. " Business is online, starting from connection" has become the consensus of enterprises ." Cheng Jinhu emphasized, "BIP's socialized interconnection , inseparable from the support of the integrated iPaaS platform."
YonLinker is not only a development platform, but also an operation platform, which can provide enterprises with modern and high-quality integration. Compared with the previous heavy ESB, YonLinker can be configured in a low-code or no-code way to achieve integration . Its advantages are mainly reflected in the following three aspects: First, it has a built-in ability to access Yonyou’s full product API. Currently, it can provide About 10,000 APIs; second, Yonyou has preset about 1,000 various integration assets on YonLinker based on its 20 years of project accumulation, which can be used out of the box; third, the YonLinker integrated development platform has been tempered by many actual projects , can effectively adapt to various domestic integrated products quickly and maintain stable operation.
Integration is a must in the BIP phase. Although YonLinker is the core component of UFIDA BIP, the deployment of YonLinker does not depend on BIP, but can realize independent (Server version of YonLinker) and diversified deployment and application according to the user's own environment and needs.
"In the cloud era, the most important implementation method at present is the integration of the cloud and the cloud, including the development and verification on the cloud, and the integration implemented under the cloud." Cheng Jinhu said, "In practice, users can Realized through the combination of YonLinker's development platform and operation platform, assets are first authenticated in the cloud, and then deployed locally after the authentication is completed."
At present, there are three main delivery methods of YonLinker: first, obtain integration assets through the YonLinker integration market, and directly verify the delivery; second, there are no ready-made integration assets, but you can refer to similar integration assets and choose to copy and modify them directly into production, for example For example, if you have already connected JD’s integrated assets, then when you connect to another e-commerce company, although you have not done it before, you can directly copy it according to the model of JD’s integrated assets, and slightly adjust the communication protocol or message mapping. relationship, can achieve effective production, and can ensure the reliability of the quality of integrated assets; third, personalized integration, through the low-code environment provided by YonLinker to configure assets and put them into production.
Relying on the connection integration capabilities accumulated over decades of enterprise service experience, UFIDA can provide enterprise customers with continuous and operational connection integration services, with three characteristics of "open interconnection, easy integration, and digital and intelligent connection": through internal management & external collaboration, Connect enterprises with ecological partners to realize industrial interconnection; based on a unified hybrid cloud gateway that can penetrate multi-party networks, provide customers with safe, stable, and out-of-the-box hybrid cloud integration services; through integration, internal management and external Collaboration helps enterprises achieve business innovation.
For example, an international energy company has multiple systems such as MDM, SRM, ERP, CDS, and OA. Although the company has a central data platform to support the operation of these systems, the data is not coordinated, resulting in a lot of manual duplication of work. After adopting UFIDA YonLinker, the international energy company realized four major integrations: first, get through the business process and realize business integration; second, data integration, business and financial sharing data, and consolidate the data to the central data platform for analysis and display; third, interface integration, unified management through the bus of YonLinker, providing unified data conversion capabilities for enterprises; fourth, system integration, using the OA system as a unified working platform to open up a single point and single channel, and realize the integration and unification of business portals , the full amount of business can be conveniently handled through the OA workbench.
Compared with traditional integration tools, YonLinker's greatest value innovation is reflected in the integration of assets and operability. Cheng Jinhu explained: "Through decades of hard work, our platform has achieved direct connections with more than 2,000 domestic banks, and has also realized direct asset transfers with JD.com, Tmall, Pinduoduo, Douyin, and various partners. Connected. These assets are all online and standardized, deposited on YonLinker, and can be used out of the box. Asset integration has become the mainstream mode of current integration.”
All kinds of integration assets from Yonyou and its partners can enter the YonLinker integration market after passing the certification of YonLinker platform, realize the social opening of assets, assets can be priced and sold, and can ensure continuous iteration and high reliability sex. "Integrating assets means that the assets are standardized or certified by the original factory, which ensures the reliability and stability of the assets, and follows the standardized process during project delivery, thereby accelerating deployment and application." Cheng Jinhu said, "Because The integrated assets are all preset, and when the project is delivered, it may only need to configure the IPs of both parties and exchange certificates to start a highly reliable operation journey.”
Connection integration is also an ecology
UFIDA's survey shows that more than 80% of enterprise IT departments believe that due to too many integration relationships and too many elements, the relationship between software used within the enterprise cannot be accurately evaluated. With the accelerated pace of enterprises migrating to the cloud, hybrid cloud scenarios have become the norm, and data security and data consistency have become difficulties in hybrid cloud integration. Entering the BIP stage, the internal management boundaries of the enterprise are broken and become socialized. Socialized connection and collaboration become the key to unlocking the integration problem.
Modern integration mainly includes five aspects: integration of enterprise applications, integration of on-cloud and off-cloud hybrid clouds, integration on pure public clouds, social industrial interconnection, and openness of ecological integration. The Yonyou Connect integration platform can effectively meet the needs of these five aspects. "The reason why socialized connection integration is difficult is mainly because there are many manufacturers, products, and specifications involved in socialized collaboration, and product updates and iterations are fast, so it is difficult to guarantee the stability and reliability of connection integration. Therefore, integrated assets are not only It is a matter of UFIDA, but requires the coordination and joint operation of all parties.” Cheng Jinhu said, “Because of this, we are committed to promoting the standardization of integration, standardizing all APIs of UFIDA and opening them up; at the same time, we plan to organize a The integrated ecological conference brings together relevant manufacturers to jointly formulate specifications, promote mutual authentication of integration, and help enterprise users effectively lower the threshold of integration."
Connection integration is a fast-growing market. For example, foreign Salesforce, as well as domestic Huawei and Alibaba are increasing their investment in connection integration. Talking about the future development trend of connection integration, Cheng Jinhu summarized the following three points: first, mainstream manufacturers should realize extensive asset interconnection and support out-of-the-box applications; second, promote the paid use of API assets; third, in Overlay operation status is the key in connection integration.
"For enterprise customers, the core value of connection integration is reflected in how to use it effectively, rather than simply buying a software tool. Customers want to keep connection integration available 24 hours a day, so operation is the core part of integration." Cheng Jinhurushi explain.
UFIDA's connection integration solution can give full play to the connection function of social commerce, and connect individual enterprise units to form an ecosystem. In this ecosystem, each enterprise provides corresponding services to ecological partners, and at the same time accepts services from ecological partners, and based on this, they jointly build a social business infrastructure to support the high-quality development of digital intelligence enterprises .