#765 OIC - Integration, Process & Insight - Netsuite Data Sync Use Case

Introduction

OIC is a toolkit - 4 main tools -

Integration - connect your apps

Process - intelligent human workflows - can be used to extend apps or for your own custom processes.

Insight - analyze what's going on in Integration and Process, but this from a business user perspective. More details below.

Visual Builder - create net new apps on top of your apis.

For those who haven't seen Insight before - the OraDocs provide the following succinct description of what it offers -

Integration Insight in Oracle Integration provides a business-friendly experience,
allowing users to model, collect, and monitor business-level metrics using web-based
dashboards.
Integration Insight works with business processes that are implemented using the
Integrations or Processes features in Oracle Integration.
At a high level, Integration Insight provides:
• A web-based interface to:
– Model business processes, including milestones
– Map models to a business processes implementation
– Monitor business progress through dashboards
• Efficient workflow requiring no development effort and minimal impact to runtime.
• Advanced analytics presented in both preconfigured and custom dashboards.

The following example leverages 3 of the OIC tools - Integration, Process and Insight in the context of a Netsuite data synchronisation use case.

Please see my previous post here, for details of leveraging Visual Builder on top of Netsuite.

Integration

Let's begin the with the integration that implements the data sync use case -
Commiskey Inc. uses SFDC for CRM and Netsuite for ERP. The company needs to ensure that customers and contacts are synced between the 2 SaaS apps.

Now may your God bless your eyesight, if you can decipher the above.
Let me break it down into readable chunks -

The REST Trigger payload includes customer and contact data.
First step in the integration is to validate the data.
Currently, I just check whether the contact email is in a valid format.
If not, a Process is called - this Process allowing a business user to correct errors and resubmit the payload to the integration.

The Integration continues, if the email is valid -

As you can see, I check if the customer already exists in Netsuite.
I create a new customer, if it doesn't exist.

the same idea for Contact -

Process

Now to the Process - it too is very simple -

The Integration is, of course, the one I have just described.

The FixError Human Task uses the following UI Form -

The Process Design Time is no-code. The above Process and Form were created in a matter of minutes.

So back to the use case, the integration calls the process and throws an error, if the email is invalid.
A business user fixes the error and the integration is called again.

Now to the 3rd OIC tool - Insight.

Insight

Insight has just been re-released - 

Users Guide is available here

Here's a quick intro for those new to Insight -

You have OIC Integrations /Processes that implement business processes e.g.employee on-boarding.
Such a business process has it own milestones e.g. employee created in Fusion HCM, employee created in ActiveDirectory, employee created in Payroll etc.

You enter these milestones in an Insight Model e.g.

At each milestone one can create variables of type Dimensions or Measures.
Dimensions - how you want to slice the data e.g. in the onboarding case - I want to analyse new employees by department or country. A measure could be salary etc.

Once you have the model, you then simply map these milestones to events in your integrations and processes e.g. Map the Payroll Employee created milestone to an Invoke of the Fusion ERP adapter, creating the employee record in ERP Payroll.

Then the magic comes in - Insight generates business user facing dashboards, giving business users the insight they need into their business processes executing on OIC.

Now back to my simple example of syncing Customer/Contacts from SFDC with Netsuite -

Here is my simple model - 

Now you can imagine how easily I can map these functional milestones to my integration.

I add a couple of Dimensions and Measures - making it easy for business users to slice and dice the data.

Mapping is done back in the Integration Design time.

Now let's kick off an integration and see what happens -

Testing

Note, the invalid email address above.

The response in Postman is as follows -

Back in Process - there's work to be done

Let's check out the Insight Dashboard -

Note the numbers -

Now I go back to the Process UI and fix the email address.

Now back to Insight -

Note the change in numbers.

I can also create my own custom dashboards in Insight -

The result -

Naturally, I can drill down - let's look at the Irish orders -

Let's check out Commiskey Vegan Farms -