Helping your IT department untangle the business spaghetti

Business Solutions are ultimately run-on specialised software that can streamline your business’s operations to achieve more visibility and productivity. However, you must first “untangle the spaghetti” to find the best business solution that suits your organisation. This process is daunting, because connecting all your company’s needs and defining the correct workflow is filled with complexity.

As a quick example, your Purchasing system may run using security gateways, messaging systems, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), an API Manager etc. Overlaying each individual piece of software is a layer of configuration that makes up the runtime for each specific business solution. i.e., security gateway policies, messaging systems queues, Enterprise Service Bus Flows, etc.

When viewed like this, we can see that business solutions take ‘paths’ through ‘systems’. These paths are complex and vary depending on the business problem being solved.

Coliance understands that every client desires end-to-end visibility in their transactions, improved customer service and easy trouble shooting.

Sometimes, however, this is unattainable with your IT team kept busy monitoring whether machines are running, or if the software installed is operational. They spend much of their time examining individual artifacts on these systems, as well as the queues and the flows. Chances are, they will not have an unobstructed view of those complex paths that the business solution uses through individual systems.

Coliance believes you should monitor your business – not your systems.

Our business monitoring solution OPSIS was written from the ground up to tackle this problem from the perspective of putting your business first.

OPSIS provides a business view primarily, allowing decisions to be based on the business first, not the infrastructure that runs it. We map out your company’s problem areas and examine your workflow to ensure that the software meets your individual requirements.

The above figure, for example, shows a typical ordering process. OPSIS reaches into the spaghetti that is the running solution and extracts the vital strands that are necessary to clearly show the business at hand and not the tangled maze underlying it.

Further analysis and deeper insight will provide the USER with the capability to fix ‘message specific issues.’

The above view shows the USER a particular order that has not been invoiced. The USER can therefore correct errors that are caused by corrupted or inaccurate orders without taking valuable time away from the IT team. Even if they have spare time, IT teams might not understand the complexity of the problem and will therefore not offer a viable solution for the subtle fixes required.

OPSIS provides insights into the business solution required, freeing your organisation to focus on incoming questions without engaging the IT department.

“Where is my customer’s order?” for example, is easily answered. It allows your organisation to engage and produce a solution in real time. In addition, OPSIS offers a secure business partner portal which allows your partners to ask the same or more detailed questions such as “What stage is my order at?” or “Has my order been dispatched?” This portal enables business partners to get real-time information on their orders without taking up the time of the business agents at all. Coliance has witnessed this process saving IT departments many issue solving hours that could be utilised to create new solutions and drive the business forward.