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…)

When setting up a supply chain integration, there is a lot of information that is exchanged. One thing that should be explored is what the supplier will do if they can’t process the order. This should be explored by making a list of all the errors that you can conceive of. This is the beginning of your test plan. Then having the Vendor respond with what they will do. (this doesn’t have to be actual transfer of erroring files, it can just be filing out a form with what will happen when said error is sent.  But of course, actually sending bad files to and from your test systems is a good idea when possible.) In the end you will have an idea of what will happen and what to expect when something goes wrong. However, sometimes this doesn’t cover all the bases.

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To paraphrase a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune, “The Data must flow.”  And in the same sense that spice was the life blood of Arakis, the flow of data is the life blood of any e-commerce integration.  In the past I have talked about how RFID technology can be used to enhance the flow of data.  In an e-commerce supply chain it can give more up to date information as to where products are located, and thus what state they are in. (more…)

Today at Spend Matters, Jason Busch posted the first in a series of articles about the gap between finance, and procurement in today’s business; “When Will finance Take Procurement Seriously?“  Jason quotes from a Basware study and professor Mark Frohlich, one if its authors, and makes some hard hitting and insightful points;

• 27% of companies surveyed have CFO’s holding a positive view of procurement’s impact on the bottom line.
• Finance does not believe that Procurement knows how to reduce costs. (more…)

Looking for innovation in Supply Chains isn’t hard to do, and it can have a great impact on the efficiency and therefore profitability of a business and market.  One place that greatly impacts the success of an integration is the desire to  build something new and sexy.  I rant sometimes about companies or development teams I have seen go down this path to their own detriment.

But today I want to tell you about a company I heard about that has created new efficiencies through integration efforts of a part of business you may have thought was already integrated.  The company is  INTTRA.  And instead of coming up with an untried technology, INTTRA used a combination of existing technologies to do something new. (more…)

One of the things that Integration Engineers are asked to do is create documentation.  But as we all know, many times documentation is the last and poorest part of a project.  Developers and programmers don’t generally like writing documentation, and are generally considered the most qualified.

In comes the Integration Engineer to make the system work.  Producing effective documentation at this point is important.  We want to make the system work, and then hand if off to the team that will support it.  If we don’t create effective documentation, this last step can never happen, and we will be unable to undertake new integration work because we are still supporting the first one.  And if we are a contractor, we need this even more. (more…)

So you have done everything right.  You have gathered standards, documented your processes and deployed a successful integration.  Now what?  Do we just sit back watch the data flow and sip soft drinks?

I don’t think so.  You will now start to handle exceptions.  This means errors.  Most likely you will start to have repeating errors. Someone will have overlooked or misunderstood something, and now every time this thing happens there is an exception. (more…)

If you are tracking inventory, or transactions, you need to get data about the whereabouts of the things you are tracking.  In this instance, more data is better.  I found this video on YouTube where Sanjay Sarma from MIT gives a lecture on Supply Chain Management and using RFID technology.

Whether we are integrating the data gathered from RFID tracking, or using the techniques in our tracking of data transactions, the benefit is the same; A more robust, and flexible set of data and better issue resolution work flow. (more…)