Connect systems
Netsuite Integrations
Netsuite Integrations are one of the most obvious automations that can be deployed. Automating the transfer of data between your customer facing storefront and your Netsuite system is a great example. Another example is automating the transfer of information between your systems and your suppliers systems. Understanding the potential of integrations is an important first step in defining the approach.
Netsuite Integration Considerations
Each system that is being integrated is typically customized and hence the integration will need to be customized as well. Because of this, we favor approaches backed by full programming languages that enable us to tailor the integration logic to match the business logic. Easy to use typically is a false promise for us, integration is a complicated job with big implications and getting that last 1% perfectly accurate is critical.
- Volume of traffic. Understanding the traffic and how it will flow is important. Just because it is the cloud does not mean you have infinity capacity. A poorly designed integration can create a network storm consuming valuable server resources.
- Number of Systems. Integrating one system to Netsuite on a single record is not extremely complicated, but like a network as the number of systems increases, we encounter problems like race conditions and what is the system of truth. In a well designed system, the integration itself can become the source of record, and the clients to that become self-healing.
- Licensing Requirements Ideally you'll want development and test environments. If you are paying per connection this can get expensive fast. In one instance we were connecting to a single end point but because the company (Amazon) used multiple domains, we ended up needed 6 connections, for just the production environment.
The devil is in the details
Integration on it's own is relatively straightforward. Where it gets complex is managing the traffic and keeping the integrity with the business processes. Because of this, in our experience you are much better off just building the integration using a flexible approach that gives you the support of a full programming language.
Pre Built Starter Integrations
Every integration is different because every customer is different. We've integrated most of the big names and many more. From a few records a day to several a minute, there are approaches for each scenario.
Price, scalability, and logic processing all come into play. When we can, we just drive the whole integration out of Netsuite and we've done thousands of orders a day using this approach.
As the environment becomes more complex, we may use a combination of middleware like Airflow and Event Bus systems like Kafka to keep the environment quiet.
