Is it fair to assume that at least a few times in your career, you’ve found yourself working on a project where you had to jump between various different software and applications – copying and pasting the same content repeatedly to make sure it’s in multiple locations, or plugging data from one system into another? Is it also fair to assume that this can be a drawn-out, mundane process that uses up a LOT of your precious time?
Thought so. Unfortunately, tasks such as these are crucial to business success and do need to get done, one way or another. If this is striking a chord, integrations could save the day – especially with the help of Unifii’s Integration Engine App.
What is an integration, and why use them?
Integrations can be huge complements to your business processes, but there’s often confusion surrounding what they actually are and how they are beneficial. Essentially, they are connections between systems and applications, that work together as a whole to share data. They are built on APIs (application programming interface) and connect all parts of your software together so that everything can be used simultaneously with no friction occurring.
As companies are constantly growing and evolving, with this comes an innate need for new software – and a need for extra time and money on top of this. Having solid integrations in place allows you to keep the system you are currently using and add connections to third-party applications. This improves your business functionality by providing you with additional features you may need, but can’t build within your standalone software on its own.
Integrations are ultimately a way of coordinating business processes and drastically improving the productivity of your various teams, as they reduce time spent carrying out manual operations for necessary tasks. This means increased flexibility, allowing your business to scale for future growth.
The above (and more) are all able to work with your software to achieve various needs of your business. For example, advertising integrations allow you to market and reach your target audience, while email integrations help with personalisation of email automation and tracking the success of your sales campaigns.
The difference between custom and out-of-the-box integrations
It’s worth bearing in mind the key differences between custom and out-of-the-box integrations. This is important to consider in order for your business to get the best fit. The main distinction here is that out-of-the-box integrations are very user-friendly: quick and easy to install and understand, they are are able to be deployed almost instantly. Typically, these native integrations will fulfill most standard business needs.
However, you may well have more complex requirements than a standard integration will be able to help with. If this is the case, tailor-made integrations would likely be a better match: – they are designed to aid with your specific business needs and are therefore more intricate. For this reason they do require engineering and coding and will take longer to develop. That said, opting for custom integrations does open the door to having a fully customised integration system, with all the features you need to work at optimal performance.
It very much depends on your business needs before you decide which way to go, so make sure this is fully understood before making your decision.
How do we come in?
With Unifii’s Integration Engine App, you can work with a single point of management for integrations, able to deliver them natively within your ServiceNow instance. All the integrations are managed through data not code within the app, and you have the ability to validate and correct any integration errors.
The app supplies a bespoke data model, allowing your integrations to be created in a low/no code effort. This drastically reduces the complexity of your system whilst also providing a single management and processing framework; you can perform key management tasks and operational reporting, with a single point of management for multiple integrations. Integrating multiple processes and vendors is. Best of all, everything is delivered natively within your ServiceNow instance, meaning no need for external tools.
We appreciate that the app may still be complex to configure, which is why we’ve included a custom guided setup utilising the Service Portal, which will minimise the complexity of configuring the app. Who said it had to be tricky?
Happy Integrating!
Unifii's Integration Engine App is now live on the ServiceNow store. For more information on how we could potentially help your business, please get in touch with one of the team here.