Ron Halversen, vice-president of sales and marketing at Clarity Ventures, discusses howt Clarity Connect can connect a variety of eCommerce software.

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

As an eCommerce integration platform, Connect allows you to integrate multiple applications, each with its own format. For example, a patient can fill out a form on a patient portal, which is then picked up by Connect and converted to HL7V2 before pushing the data into the hospital's EMR or EHR. Similarly, an eCommerce storefront order might be converted from rest before conversion within Connect and pushing as an EDI order to a supply chain vendor for drop shipping. Whether the application connection is a database, file, web services, API connection, or another format, the Connect architecture is designed to handle it.

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

  1. The first is a simple embedded integration. For example, posting a YouTube video on a webpage or adding your Google analytics code to your website.
  2. API calls are usually handled within the application such as when buying online, the sites checkout screen can calculate sales tax and estimate your shipping rates by making an API call to UPS or FedEX
  3. Next, we have the more complex and one way persistent API integrations. For example, a project we built for an online pharmacy needed multiple API integrations with both medical and FDA APIs, so that when a prescription was 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 classification.
  4. Finally, we have the typical full bidirectional 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 of your back office business processes with your front office website, storefront portal, and more.
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There are three main architectural types of integrations:

  1. The first are the Cloud to on-premises integrations. These are the most common. An example would be a small- to mid-size company integrating their WooCommerce ERP with their QuickBooks software to automatically process online orders and payments.
  2. The second moves the back office application to the Cloud, so everything is now running in the Cloud. Examples would be a Shopify storefront integrated with a Sage 100 Cloud install, Salesforce, or QuickBooks Online.
  3. The last model happens all behind the clients firewall. Those 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, et cetera. Connect is designed out of the box to handle all these scenarios and more complex hybrid scenarios as well.
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The most common integrations are Cloud to on-premises. These on-presise Cloud solutions is where we integrate your ERP to 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 bidirectional 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 connection back to the eCommerce storefront might only get pulled once an hour. In this scenario, Connect is normally installed behind your firewall to tuck 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 applications.

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Another popular integration starts with your eCommerce online and 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, the Connect CRM is also installed in the Cloud with application-specific access restrictions to enable a fully SaaS-based and secure integration solution.

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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 connection or manufacturing software. Connect, in this instance, is installed on a VM or a 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.

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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 bidirectional and will integrate the creation of user accounts on the portal side pushing sales orders, invoice payments, return, and quote requests into the office ERP/CRM. To improve your 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 3000 integrations under our belt, we help clients automate, customize and improve many other business processes and custom workflows.

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So, let's take a look at the Clarity Connect CRM dashboard. Connect uses Hangfire for managing its queues and scheduled tasks. The Hangfire dashboard shows you account 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 start to retrying 10 times every 30 minutes to rerun the job. If you want, once your application is back online, you can come into the retry queue, select all, and re-queue the jobs yourself. The same holds true for any failures or errors. You can view the error details, address the cause of the error, then select all and re-queue the job.

Let's take a view of Connect in action. So, this is a client of ours that's integrating Clarity eCommerce, or CEF, with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, referred to as NAV. Here are some of the tasks that the Connect will be running. CEF orders to NAV, NAV accounts to CEF, NAV invoices to CEF, NAV orders back to CEF, NAV products to CEF. Typical projects can have anywhere from a couple to dozens of tests that will be run.

So, let's pop into CEF and quickly purchase this item. I've spent the time up taken here because I wanted to show it to you in case you wanted to pause to view any of the screens but most importantly to show that this is an online or web order number 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. We click on the, Process CEF Orders to NAV," and click, "Trigger Now."

We then go to, "Jobs," then "Processing," and click on the job running. We can see below that there were three jobs waiting to be picked up and processed. And in just over four seconds, they've been processed and are now sitting in NAV. 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 with a credit card. In NAV, we're updating the dates to indicate that the order has been accepted and has been sent to manufacturing for processing. We'll quickly pop in the updated dates.

Now we'll go back to Clarity Connect and we'll trigger the NAV orders to CEF task, which is updating three orders, including here at the bottom, our Web-345 we just updated. Here's a quick view of the out-of-the box email notification that the order had been received and is in processing that was sent to the client. Now, when we check our order, we can see that the NAV assigned ID has been updated and our status has now changed from, "Full Payment Received," to, "Processing."

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So, that's a quick round trip of a sales order being and 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 back in the portal.

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 an on-prem Cloud solution. We offer the platform in both a one-time license with no ongoing or annual fees or a SaaS based monthly pricing, whether you need CapEx or OpEx accounting. With over 3000 integrations, we have prebuilt 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 www.clarity-ventures.com. Thanks for watching.

 

A Clearer View For eCommerce

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