Integrating Best-of-Breed Technologies

Integrating Best-of-Breed Technologies (Joe Poskie, Meridian)

This session was essentially best practice and common Proliance integrations they have seen. When planning integrations, one should think through the following:

• Why do you want to integrate? (e.g., eliminate double entry, extend solutions to expert systems, provide a single look and feel, improve visibility)
• Who is going to benefit? (Just because you can doesn't mean you should!)
• What are you going to integrate? (e.g., decision support data, interfaces between different phases/aspects of a project like design, estimates/schedules, budget/cost, accounting)
• When are you going to move data or interact? When does it make sense? (real-time or daily/weekly batch)
• How are you going to integrate? (e.g., using metadata fields)

Overall, they recommend that the steps should be to

1. Flowchart the process
2. Map the systems involved (field to field)
3. Identify the integration process

Typical integrations they have seen are:

Scheduling: Typical interests are baseline schedule and estimates, and the latest schedule and forecasts. From this, one may be interested in setting/adjusting submittal due dates. They have seen/performed integrations with MS Project and Primavera P6. This type of integration might be user-initiated.

Financial/Accounting: The typical need driving this is to support invoicing and/or cost controls. Where there is interplay between systems, it is important to differentiate where the actions are initiated vs. where they are approved. This type of integration might be an example of one that is scheduled nightly or weekly depending on the data.

Document Management: There is often an interest to integrate with the corporate file management standard so that new records are automatically created in Proliance when they are added to the corporate system. One might use Sharepoint for all internal and working files, and have the official RFI or Daily Work Journal files (say) in Proliance for any external users. A folder structure helps identify document type. Additional metadata fields could help identify whether something is a new or a revision. This type of integration normally occurs as soon as it can because the user will likely want to use the file immediately.

Another possibility would be to integrate our network account system with Proliance user accounts.

It sounds like information is normally added to Proliance through a "message bus adapter" they have developed. To get data out of Proliance, its workflow features can be used by sending messages to an integration server.

Something important to remember is that integrations into a system (Proliance or otherwise) require consistency in the source system. For example, if Primavera schedules are to be imported into Proliance, a prerequisite would be that everyone in the company was using Primavera fields exactly the same way all of the time.