Clarity Connect Demo Transcription

Hi, Ron from Clarity. I’m here to introduce you to Clarity Connect, our robust and enterprise-class integration platform.

Overview Slide

As an integration platform, Connect allows you to integrate multiple applications, each with its own format. For example, a patient fills out a form in a patient portal, which is then picked up by Connect and converted to HL7v2 before pushing the data into the hospital’s EMR/EHR. Similarly, an eCommerce storefront order might be converted from REST before conversion within Connect and pushing an EDI order to a Supply Chain vendor for drop-shipping. Whether the application connection is a database, file, web services, API connection, or other format, the Connect architecture is designed to handle it.

Classes of Integrations Slide

Here are the four main classifications of integrations, listed simplest to most complex, although Connect is normally only needed for the last two types.

• The first is a simple embedded integration. For example, posting a YouTube video on a web page, or adding your Google Analytics code to your website.
• API calls are usually handled within the application, such as when buying online, the site’s checkout screen can calculate sales tax and estimate your shipping rates by making an API call to UPS or FedEx.
• Next, we have the more complex and one-way persistent API integrations. For example, a project we built for an online eCommerce pharmacy needed multiple API integrations with medical and FDA APIs, so when a prescription is called in, the solution can automatically check to see if that prescription is covered by the patient’s insurance and may have any negative side effects with any of the patient’s other prescriptions. EDI integrations for Supply Chain also fall into this class.
• Finally, we have the typical full, bi-directional and persistent integrations with your back-office applications, such as your ERP, CRM or fulfillment software. This feature of Connect is where we can fully integrate and automate all your back-office business processes with your front-office website, storefront, portal and more.

Types of Integrations Slide

There are 3 main architectural types of integrations:

• The first are the Cloud-to-On-premises integrations. These are the most common. An example would be a small to mid-sized company integrating their WooCommerce storefront with their QuickBooks software to automatically process online orders and payments.
• The second moves the back-office application to the cloud, so everything is now running in the cloud. An example would be a Shopify storefront integrated with Sage100c (cloud), Salesforce or QuickBooks online.
• The last model happens all behind the client’s firewall. These integrations are used to integrate and automate a company’s full back-office applications into a fully automated solution. Your accounting software talks to your ERP. The ERP talks to the warehouse. The warehouse to manufacturing, etc.

Connect is designed, out of the box, to handle all these scenarios and more complex/hybrid scenarios as well.

Cloud to On-Premises Slide

• The most common integrations are cloud to On-premises. This is where we integrate your ERP into your online storefront to automate the posting of products, pricing updates, invoices, inventory, as well as updating your customer’s order and shipping status (to name a few examples). This is also common for integrating patient portals into a hospital’s EMR.
• From the eCommerce side, the integration automates user registration, sales order processing, invoice payments, quote requests and much more.
• Connect has a persistent, bi-directional connection which can run an unlimited number of tasks in either real time, or on a schedule. For example, while sales orders get pushed in real time to the ERP (to ensure shipping goes out on time), inventory updates from the ERP back to eCommerce might only get pulled once an hour.
• In this scenario, Connect is normally installed behind your firewall to talk securely to your back-office application, then configured to communicate outside the firewall only with the eCommerce or portal solution. This provides complete control over redundancy and security with your back-office application(s).

Cloud-to-Cloud

• Another popular integration starts with your eCommerce or online portal in the cloud needing to be integrated with another SaaS-based application.
• These integrations are common with NetSuite, Salesforce, Microsoft 365 applications, QuickBooks online and many more.
• In this scenario, Connect is also installed in the cloud with application specific access restrictions to enable a fully SaaS-based and secure integration solution.

On-prem to On-Prem

• The last configuration is where a client wants to connect two on-premise applications behind their own firewall.
• For example, connecting their accounting software with their ERP or manufacturing software.
• Connect is then installed on a VM or server behind the customer’s firewall, so it can securely integrate with all the applications needed to provide the complete solution.
• This is common when customers are looking to improve the accuracy of their data shared between all their back-office applications and are looking to improve and automate many of their business processes.

Typical integration workflows

• Every project begins with a technical discovery where a Clarity Business Analyst works with your team to document all the available data fields and workflows that can be integrated with each of your company’s applications, helping you define the ones you need to drive and achieve your business goals.
• Typical integrations are usually bi-directional and will integrate the creation of user accounts on the portal side, pushing sales orders, invoice payments, return and quote requests into the Back-office ERP or CRM.
• To improve their customer’s user experience, the reverse integration would typically push product updates, inventory counts, order and shipping status and control all the customer-specific information in the portal, such as custom pricing, purchasing terms and invoicing (for example).
• Although these may be the typical integration workflows, with over 3,000 integrations under our belt, we help clients automate, customize and improve many other business processes and custom workflows.

Hangfire Screenshots

• So let’s take a look at the Connect dashboard. Connect uses Hangfire for managing it’s queues and scheduled tasks. The Hangfire dashboard shows you a count of all the transactions within any of the queues at the top of the screen.
• You can click and drill down into a queue to see the actual transactions as they occur, such as these email batch jobs running.
• If any of the applications are offline when a job is trying to process, Connect moves the job to the retry queue and starts retrying 10 times every 30 minutes to rerun the job. If you want, once the app is back online, you can select all, and requeue the job your self.
• The same holds true for any failures or errors. You can view the error details, addressing the cause of the error, then select all and requeue the jobs.

Now let’s view Connect in action

• This is a client of ours that’s integrating Clarity eCommerce, or CEF with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, or NAV.
• Here are some of the tasks that the connector will be running:
  - Process CEF orders to NAV
  - Process NAV accounts to CEF
  - Process NAV invoices to CEF
  - Process NAV orders to CEF
  - Process NAV products to CEF
• Typical projects can have anywhere from a couple to dozens of tasks that will be run
• So let’s pop into CEF and quickly purchase this item. I’ve sped up the time taken but wanted to show it in case you wanted to pause and view any of the screens, but most importantly to show that this is an online, or web order #345 in CEF.
• Now that it’s purchased, we’ve turned off Connect, so we can show you manually which job is triggered to process the orders (normally this will occur via automated/scheduled tasks – for demo purposes we’re triggering manually).
• We click on the Process CEF orders to NAV and click Trigger Now
• We then go to jobs, Processing, and click on the job running.
• We can see below that there were 3 jobs waiting to be picked up and processed, and in just over 4 seconds, they’ve been processed and are now sitting in NAV.
• So here we see the NAV order, right here we’ve created a custom order number called web-345, which was our order. You can also see that NAV has generated its own order key as well and we can drill into the order to accept and update the order for the integration return trip of an order status update.
• For this client, when an order is placed, the default status is “Full Payment Received” if it was paid for by credit card.
• In NAV, we’re updating the dates that indicate that the order has been accepted and has been sent to manufacturing for processing. We’ll quickly pop in the updated dates,
• Then go back to Connect and trigger the NAV Orders to CEF task, which is updating 3 orders, including here at the bottom our web-345 order we just updated.
• Here’s a quick view of the OOTB email notification that the order has been received and is in processing and when we go back to our CEF dashboard, and check our order, you can see that the NAV assigned ID has been updated, and our status has now changed from Full payment received to Processing.
• So that’s a quick round-trip of a Sales order being processed from an online store to the back-office ERP, and then the company confirming the order, an order notification email sent to the customer and the customer’s order status being updated in the portal.

Summary Slide

• So in summary, Clarity Connect provides a highly-customizable integration platform that allows you to connect any of your front and back-office applications,
• In any architectural configuration, whether in the cloud, on-prem or both.
• We offer the platform in both a one-time license, with no ongoing or annual fees, or SaaS-based monthly pricing, whether you need Capex or Opex accounting.
• With over 3,000 integrations, we have pre-built connectors to hundreds of applications,
• With an asynchronous architecture that ensures data in transfer is not lost, even when an integrated application is offline.
• Finally, for those of you that want to enhance and extend your integrations, the platform and connector source code is also available.

For more information on integrating and improving your business processes, give us a call or visit us online at clarity dash ventures dot com. Thanks for watching.