We’ve entered the fourth industrial revolution, and if companies aren’t careful, the UK could end up falling behind the rest of the G7.
This warning primarily concerns businesses in the manufacturing and logistics sectors, particularly as we are already behind average in robotics and automation adoption (we currently have 85 robots per 10,000 workers, while Korea has 710, and Germany has 322).
While an estimated 20 million jobs could be replaced by robots in the future, the UK risks falling behind to the point where businesses simply don’t invest or use UK services in the future.
We need to hit the delicate balance between automation, upskilling, and retraining. For businesses of all kinds, this means you need to start with enterprise integration:
Cost of the Status Quo
It is never an option for a business to keep the status quo, even if your numbers are up and you’re doing well. If you maintain your current business operations, you will inevitably fall behind. The big AI boom has dropped off, but that just means that the fascination and panic that businesses initially had when all these AI tools came out didn’t live up to expectations.
Just as there was a .com bubble burst, there will likely be an AI bubble burst. Do you know what happens after that? Lasting change. This means you need to prep your business for automation now, be selective with the tools you use, and use that strategy to bulldoze through your competition.
What is Enterprise Integration?
Large-scale businesses need hundreds of different systems to work. These systems each produce their own datasets, and may or may not be able to talk to one another. If you want to keep your business productive and growing in the next decade, then you absolutely need every single system in your operations to be able to communicate freely.
Enterprise integration services work to connect those systems. This full-body strategy includes the use of iPaaS, messaging systems, pub/sub message patterns, APIs, and more. All these tools are used at once to build communication bridges between your systems so that your business can effectively:
How to Get Started with Enterprise Integration
Integrating your entire enterprise to allow for automation is no easy task. That’s why you’ll want to take these steps slowly, and focus on primary systems first before expanding your focus:
1. Prioritize Your Needs
You’ll first need to assess your current system. For example, you may already have some automation in place that you can start with. You will also need to take a full account of all the systems you use, how data flows through them, where data is stored, and so on. In short, you need the full picture of your system.
Once you have it, you will then need to group systems based on your business goals in order of priority.
2. Select an Integration Platform
The easiest way to integrate your system is with a singular platform. In most cases, enterprises will want an iPaaS, which stands for integration platform as a service. This is a cloud-based platform where you can load up all of your systems. The reason it’s so popular is because it has pre-built connectors for many of the most commonly used systems today. In short, it’s almost a plug-and-play platform that will get your software talking.
3. Map Out Your Integration Architecture
You need a full map of how every system is linked together, how data flows, how data is sorted, and where it is finally stored. You’ll likely want to add additional systems, like a data fabric and warehouse.
These data-led frameworks work to collect all your data into a single source of truth. Warehouses, in particular, are useful for enterprise-sized businesses since they can keep legacy or historical versions of files behind the current one, allowing you to make use of predictive analytics.
Organizing all your data into a data fabric will help you keep track of all your information in a way that minimizes data errors and improves processing speeds.
4. Testing, Testing, and More Testing
While iPaaS and APIs can work to link different systems together quickly, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will do it with utmost efficiency – at least at first. That’s why you need to adjust the configuration settings and test them repeatedly. It takes a lot of time to fine-tune an automation system, but once you do, you can benefit from scalable automation that is fully prepared to take your company into the future.
