Finding an effective and efficient business integration platform can accelerate your business environment and keep all parts of your organization working in sync. In today’s business world the need for integration and automation is everywhere, from sales staff on the road, warehouse staff in the bays, engineers on the shop floor, and even customers and suppliers in your value chain. Linking them all together in a seamless web of commerce and understanding has never been more evident. Epicor Service Connect automation can help with a business integration platform that has everything businesses need to excel in this integrated, automated environment.
Epicor Service Connect is a central business integration platform for secure workflow orchestrations within Epicor service software applications and between Epicor and non-Epicor applications. Users can automate tasks and streamline processes to promote efficiency across the supply and demand chains. Extend visibility into your enterprise applications to the entire organization and to your partners, suppliers, and customers. Epicor Service Connect integrates with EDI supply chain partners using XML, a lower cost alternative to maintaining a full EDI infrastructure.
By using documents as its primary interface, Service Connect can convert data from one application into a form another application (or internal process) can understand. It uses industry-wide technologies to exchange information between applications or business processes based on data mappings and data manipulation.
A business may benefit from the use of Service Connect for many reasons. Some reasons include:
- To automate an internal process by removing the human interaction from a process. For example, a company might use Service Connect to automate the entry of a Sales Order, based on an external trigger, or have the lines of a Sales Order automatically ship when the Sales Order has been closed. Many organizations have users spending valuable time on data entry tasks. Service Connect allows you to add workflow activities such as email and other tasks to your business workflows. By automating these repetitive tasks, you can reduce your data entry time, reduce errors, and increase the speed at which data can be accessed.
- To have one application pass information to another application, in order for the second application to process the data. An example of this would be billing information from a project tracking application to an accounting application. This would allow Accounting to bill for services rendered on the project.
- To respond back to an application with updated data after a business process has been completed. This would keep two unrelated applications in sync. For example, if an item were to be requested to be shipped in an inventory application, the data would be passed to a shipping application to be shipped, then once shipped the tracking number would be returned to the inventory application.
- To send emails requesting tasks be executed before another step of a business process can be completed. An example of this would be sending an email to a Purchase Order manager to approve a Purchase Order over a specific amount.
- To assign tasks to be completed to users, to help manage the flow of a business process. By using Service Connect Task Monitor, instead of emails, a task can be assigned to a specific user and the business process halted until the user completes the task. This could be used for setting up project service billings approvals or Personal Time Off requests.
The automation and orchestration capabilities of Service Connect improve processes within the Epicor application and improve interactions between the Epicor application and other applications. Customers in need of such capabilities find that by renewing their Service Connect license and connecting with a skilled consultant, they can extend the scope of their ERP application and yield tangible business benefits in so doing.
TeccWeb has a wide breadth and depth of experience in Service Connect and has been helping customers to get the most out of their investment.
We have the expertise to customize your Service Connect to get it to do exactly what you need.
We can analyze existing Service Connect routines to ensure they are as optimized as possible.
We make sure that all calls to Epicor are necessary, and determine which processes can be run asynchronously allowing for exponentially faster processing.
We have experience in upgrading Service Connect alongside Epicor Upgrades
We offer a unique Service Connect alternative.
We have an existing framework that allows us to communicate with Epicor through their Web/.NET services using visual studio.
This means that we can easily create imports/exports to exact specifications, allowing these routines to run faster as there is less overhead attached. This also allows us to easily pass messages back to users without needing to identify errors in the messages passed through Service Connect or develop custom error handling within the Service Connect routine which takes more time to create, and would come with an associated performance hit. With this, we can easily create custom error codes for trouble shooting based on your business needs.
Take your enterprise application to the next level. Contact us—we’d love to discuss what we can do to get you there.