One of the great uses of Anypoint Platform is automating business processes that need to interact with multiple systems and deliver useful functions. Many times these business processes are ones that started out requiring humans and as the business has grown it has become clear that the human process will no longer scale with the demand.
We’ve seen that here at MuleSoft. Here’s a great example: Sales has put together a package that meets our customer’s needs, the package has been reviewed and approved by our Sales Operations team, and now we need to create an invoice. The sales system is Salesforce and the finance system is Netsuite, so how can we bridge that gap? Anypoint, of course!
Using Anypoint Studio, we used the Salesforce API to look for opportunity objects that are in the correct state (Closed/Won and reviewed by Sales Operations). From there we map the fields in the opportunity object to the appropriate products in NetSuite and we check and see if NetSuite already has a record of the customer. If there is a customer record, we verify the billing and shipping information matches. If there is not a customer record we create a new one and add the shipping and billing addresses from Salesforce. The invoice is then double checked by an analyst and approved before it is sent out to the customer.
Let’s go over the wins for this scenario:
- Sales and Finance each get to use the system that they are most familiar with without having to be concerned about the quality or availability of “out of the box” integrations provided by those tools.
- The solution is built to fit the specific needs of each group.
- Data isn’t being manually transferred between systems, thus avoiding the risk of data entry errors. The business analyst in finance simply has fully complete invoices delivered to their workflow.
- The business process doesn’t need an army of clerks as the volume of transactions grows.
- The integration can be modified over time to suit changing and evolving needs. Since this is not an “out of the box” solution provided by someone else, we can tweak it as needs change.
Stay tuned as we introduce other exciting ways MuleSoft uses Anypoint technology! And check out this upcoming webinar on how MuleSoft uses Anypoint Platform:
