Systems Integration

I have worked within the I.T. industry for over 11 years in positions ranging from support, development, systems administration, and management. My current position requires me to do all four to some extent, however, the majority of my days are focused on development. Without systems integration, my company would not function. While many companies are striving to migrate to ERP systems which boast a single solution for all the organization's needs, the reality is ERP systems cannot solve all problems. As a result, integration is needed to some extent. Even if your company operates off of a single solution and they work with vendors and/or customers who require tight integration of supply chain systems, chances are your systems take advantage of integration.

In my career, developing for integrations consisted of supply chain document passing such as Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Advance Shipment Notices, and Invoices. While these documents are traveling usually inter-organization, some integrations that I have developed relied upon intra-organization software communicating between the them. For instance, I worked for a dental practice management company where we developed two products: one for the dental practice patient and accounting database and another product for the imaging system. In order to reduce the amount of keying and updating patient records, integration existed between the systems where the practice management system could pass the patient record to the imaging system. The dental staff would then see the images instantly appear when the program opened without having to lookup the patient's data a second time.

In terms of databases, I have also worked to link multiple Microsoft SQL databases together as well as link them to MySQL databases, too.

David Bowles