I have spent a good portion of my career managing and leading various types of integration projects and it’s interesting to note that almost all of the challenges are similar and common.
Those hurdles which almost always arise – content mapping, knowledge, and most importantly coordination – are the byproducts of customization. Few of the market places currently offer content mapping and companies need to be mindful of hidden customization costs. You may get one cost and then discover that the time, cost and resources consumed are much higher than the original estimate.
I’ve noticed in various technical team presentations over and over when it comes to integrating content maps into their solution. I think if you look at it as a two-step process, you can determine how to save more time and costs.
- Standardization – This would blindly copy or map all the fields from one format to other and this covers major chunk of content mapping.
- Custom Integration – This will help to handle custom fields or to integrate custom piece.
The truth is by having solutions or maps that can handle standard formats from a basic ERP system means the trading partner doesn’t need to re-invent the wheel. So when it comes time for customization, there’s no need to be spending more money on doing content mapping again and again.
What’s nice about this is that instead of every trading partner forking over large chunks of money, the use of standard maps reduces the time and energy spent on knowledge, coordination and content mapping and that means integrating faster and more efficiently.
