System Integration Facilities

Vision is a total sales and marketing solution perfectly suited to operation in isolation. But the value of Vision increases dramatically when it is linked to your other key systems. You may choose to implement Vision inventory management, but we recognise that you may have significant investment in existing inventory, warehouse and other ERP solutions. Sales order management only starts with taking the order, most of the work is in shipping and invoicing. It's for these reasons that Vision provides automated facilities to integrate the information in your other key systems.

• Two-way integration allowing Vision to either exchange updates with a variety of other systems
• Integration technology is open and available for use in virtually any environment and with applications of almost every technology
• Typical systems for integration include financials, inventory, scan&pack, purchasing and CRM
• Existing agents can integrate some target applications out of the box
• An open framework for ready integration of new target applications
• In-built schedulers, auditing, logging and exception handling of interface operations
• Vision is ready to synchronise products, pricing, suppliers, quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, inventory, stock allocation, pick, ship, receiving, shipping status, barcodes, serial number tracking, returns, customer and reseller details, delivery and billing addresses and most items in your sales cycle.
• Vision can synchronise other Vision sites, easily configurable to allow sites to selectively share some or all of their content.
• Vision customisable workflow can be used in conjunction with integration facilities to further control operations 

Vision Agent and Web Services
Making multiple systems work together is made easy using Vision's system of smart agents and web services. Agents are built on an framework that includes all scheduling, network transport, web service integration and error management necessary to deliver efficient and reliable application integration. Built using a secure web services infrastructure, the agent framework implements a common interface that standardises the movement of data between disparate applications.

Agents extend the framework to integrate third party applications by a variety of methods including proprietary API call, web services, direct database access, file-based interface and proprietary SDK. Action on the external system can be initiated by either the agent or the application and agents can use wait&poll transactions to wait for user-required activity on foreign systems. Vision agents have been created which work reliably even with very basic applications not normally considered candidates for system integration.

All interaction between Vision and its agents is available out of the box and transactions are already defined in xml so that only the implementation of the external interface is required to deploy a new agent.

Vision also offers access via a secured web services interface for those wishing to implement direct integration.

What information can be integrated?
The standard Vision interface transactions include (see introduction for the effective coverage):

• products
• pricing (all types)
• inventory
• sales order
• invoice
• shipment
• purchase order
• organisation

What does this mean?

• an order raised on your website is automatically passed to your financials system.
• inventory levels can be maintained from confirmation of sale or stock allocation
• your fulfillment systems complete delivery automatically and always have the right information
• your clients can see the status of every order from the Vision website
• product and pricing changes from other systems, even your suppliers' can update automatically into Vision
• your resellers and sales people can get a personalised pricebook or catalogue anytime and know the information is up to date
• You reduce staff costs and human errors

[Back To Vision]

Vision has been created using web services, industry standard formats and smart agents to deliver automated, reliable integration with other systems. Integration means that sales and order information can be linked directly to your financial and inventory systems and data in other systems can keep Vision information up-to-date.