May'22

Coherence of Workflow & Automated Integration

Organizations constantly look for an application that fulfills current business needs but wishes for a system that can coexist and seamlessly integrate with their internal applications and external partner systems. Such applications can provide a way to automate information aggregation from various sources, which is currently manual, causing ineffective and untimely business decision-making. Organizations today want to keep their business processes agile while utilizing the services offered by 3rd parties, be it about extracting or sending information to support business growth.

For example, during payroll processing, there could potentially be multiple business systems, each supporting specific functions like:

• Attendance management system, providing information about leaves for the period.
• Employee onboarding system, providing the date of joining.
• Finance system, providing the bank account details.
• Payroll system to prepare the salary slip.
• Payment processor (bank) to process the payment.

In this process, one system (payroll system) is dependent on multiple systems (employee onboarding, attendance management system, and finance system), where relevant information is available. Once the payroll system captures the required information, it would push the information to a bank to process salary payments. It becomes a hassle to manually extract data from various systems and process it to meet the end goal.

DL Asset Track™ platform has a ‘service node’ feature where a business workflow can utilize services offered by various systems and connect them appropriately before or after a business entity. This feature allows business entities to store the response from internal or external applications and then decide whether correct information has been received or not. Similarly, it allows tracking the status of the 3rd party application if it has successfully executed the required task or not.

Salient Aspects

1. Add a service node after a business entity to push required information to a 3rd party application.
2. Add a service before a business entity, so that information to make decisions within the workflow is fetched from 3rd party.
3. Store the response from the third party in an attribute and display the response to a business entity.
4. Configure the timeout settings.
5. Support various service call formats such as JSON, XML, Javascript, Text, Form data, and HTML.

Steps

Configure a service node

1. Provide basic information such as name and display name.
2. Provide the URL of the 3rd party application, and select the method (Post, Get, Put, Patch, Delete).
3. Provide the auth details (none, basic auth, oauth2, bearer token).
4. Capture the header information.
5. Capture the parameters to be sent.
6. Configure the post-run, where the response information can be stored by mapping it with a context variable or attribute.

Please find the info here.