The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Not to be masochistic, but among friends and neighbours a common topic of conversation between men is our occupations. “What do you do?” is a common question and conversation starter.  As we all know, sometimes it is difficult to explain what we do to those outside of our business.  There are people that I have known for years that still don’t really understand what it is that I do at work. (more…)

I remember a day when we had a problem with our order processing.  When we finally figured out what was wrong, there were a few embarrassed people.  We had introduced some new monitoring to the system, but had done so in such a way that we added a point of failure to the ordering process.

This was and is a bad thing.  And it can be avoided easily by making sure that you use a passive monitoring system.  By its very nature the state of a passive system has no impact on the system being monitored. (more…)

“So, how long will that take?”  Is a question that some of us have grown to hate.  And it seems that it is a question, that in various forms, we are asked daily.  (If not more frequently)  And if you have been doing this for any time, you have probably come up with a way to answer these questions.  There was a time when I started answering this question with a standard answer of, “2 weeks.”  And let me explain why.

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Its time for another mapping exercise.  This time we will receive an EDI 832 in 4010 format, and map the data to a DB or flat file.  Getting catalog data into your procurement system is an important task.  And creating  variety of mapping exercises provides us with a better understanding of how mapping projects work than just having one that tries to be everything.  And mapping is one of the fun things that we get to do.  Following this exercise we will have worked through the the common issues and demonstrated how this process comes together.

Mapping Steps

There are five steps to this mapping process.  Here is a list with a brief description of each one;

• Defining the target:  This is the first step to mapping.  We must know where we are going if we plan on getting there.  And using a Target based mapping process we decrease the time and efort of the other steps.
• Defining the Data Source:  This is the second step to mapping.  Once we know what the target looks like, we know what data we need to complete it.  So this naturally leads us to defining the source(s) of the data.  This can be a single input data file or record, or it can be multiple types of data from multiple sources.
• Defining the Processes:  Some of the data that we will need in our target will not be in the proper form or format in the source.  We will have to have a process defined in our map to convert the source data into the correct form for the target format.
• Handling customisation Points:  When we are mapping data, we will see points where we will want to make a decision on what to do.  Not all data is created or received in an equal form.  Thus we may have points in our mapping process where we will need to do a different process depending on the source or content of the data.
• Monitoring the Process:  After we have created a mapping process we will need to monitor it so that we can know when something unexpected happens.  To do this we must identify the right places in the mapping process for it to report its status to a monitoring process.  This is the last step in the mapping process.

Catalog Target

If you have a catalog, then you will have your own schema.  We are getting our schema from a standard Open Office DB template.  This way you can create your own version for this exercise.

The Product table in the Open Office Business table has these fields:

• ID, INT
• CategoryID, INT
• Discontinued, BOOLEAN
• LeadTime, VARCHAR
• ProductID, INT
• ProductDescription, VARCHAR
• ProductName, VARCHAR
• ReorderLevel, INT
• Serialnumber, VARCHAR
• SupplierID, INT
• UnitPrice, DECIMAL
• UnitsInStock, INT
• UnitsOnOrder, INT

These are the basic fields that we will be inserting data into.  We will probably have a process that will validate the supplier ID before inserting new records, but that will come in during the process step.

Next Steps

Following defining our target, we will define our source.  But we will do that in the next instalment of this exercise.   Download and create start your paper map now, we will show them in the next post as well.