Siebel Order Management Guide > Preparing for Integration >

Integration Strategy for Order Management

If you integrate Siebel applications with back-office, accounting, and other systems, you will need to develop an integration strategy. The integration tasks you should consider depend on the business needs of your company. Some tasks you may want to consider are listed below.

• Determine the system of record for each of the key data elements. Some of the data elements you should consider are:
  • Item masters (product)
  • Configuration and pricing rules
  • Customer master
• Decide how to replicate data. You can either replicate data between your Siebel application and your back office application using batch replication at regular intervals (typically daily) or using real-time replication. If you use real-time replication, you must define a triggering event that causes data to be replicated on both systems. For example, you might define the triggering event to be a transaction such as entering a new customer or a new product. Then the replication would occur when the transaction is submitted. Alternatively, you might add a button to an applet that runs a workflow that triggers replication. Because Siebel applications save data when the user steps off the record, the event you define is not necessarily tied to when data is written to the database.
• Define the points in your business process when you want to update information across systems. You identify points in the business process when you should use ASIs to update information between your Siebel application and your back-office or a third-party system. For example, when the status of an order is updated in a back-office system, you might want the order status in your Siebel application to be updated automatically. If an end user of the Siebel application performs a query while accessing a new order, you could have the back-office system update the Siebel order in real-time. If your back-office system has the capability to do this, you can implement it using the Update Siebel Order ASI. However, if it is not feasible for your back-office system to provide this update in real-time, the end user can click a Get Status button on the user interface to request the updated order information.