AboutIT is a leading business solutions provider that has a footprint spanning across South Africa. They specialize in cloud ERP and accounting systems such as Acumatica, and Sage, as well as Business Intelligence (BI), IT services, and support. AboutIT has been guiding businesses towards digital adoption and transformation since 2003 and has been the helping hand to numerous businesses in assisting with increasing the efficiency of their operations.
AboutIT was looking for an easyto-use, graphical, and configurable solution to assist them in integrating a customer’s eCommerce and Salesforce CRM solution into Acumatica. The solution the customer had in place was incredibly onerous on both the eCommerce platform and Acumatica, resulting in poor performance of the respective platforms in live environments due to poorly architected integrations. The eCommerce platform was, in fact, verging on unusable in live!
AboutIT has partnered with Synatic to solve complex and time-consuming integration challenges with rapid speed. By using Synatic’s user-friendly interface, high-impact features, and fully customizable connectors, AboutIT was able to rapidly build an integration solution for their customer without expensive resources, allowing them to move faster and get the most out of their data.
The current Acumatica developed e-commerce connector is only for Shopify and Big Commerce which posed its own limitations. To overcome this challenge AboutIT made use of connectors provided by Acuwoo as they offered a selection of connectors that were compatible with wide range e-commerce applications. Although Acuwoo had the required connectors, AboutIT still experienced flexibility, functionality and speed issues with the connectors. This resulted in information not being transferred correctly; thus, slowing down changes and updates that were made to the eCommerce website and Salesforce. When changes were made, the connectors did not reflect these changes in realtime on the additional tools in use. This was a major pain point for both AboutIT and their customer.
By partnering with Synatic, AboutIT gained access to a powerful data integration platform and a knowledgeable team of data integration experts. This in turn resulted in AboutIT being able to overcome their data integration challenges and build integration solutions more rapidly and with greater efficiency. Synatic was also able to skill up the AboutIT team and EXAH team (Salesforce consultants) to roll out their own flows. Testament to the ease of use!
Synatic was able to offer a nimble, simple, and powerful integration solution that came complete with a multitude of connectors, including WooCommerce, Salesforce and Acumatica connectors. This brought the flexibility and configurability the client needed. This, in turn, allowed AboutIT to select exactly what they wanted to integrate instead of being restricted by a pre-configured connector, and perform the integration so as to not negatively impact the respective solutions.
Gerrit Olivier, Founder and CEO at AboutIT said that once the connectors had been configured and they understood how they worked, the connectors were fairly easy to use. Olivier said the Synatic team was able to help them move solution development from a test to a live environment in a short space of time.
The buffering and added functionalities of the Synatic platform contributed to the speed that data was transferred between applications. Olivier said, “In Synatic’s instance, their buffers enabled us to queue information, and allowed it to automatically flow through our customer’s solution swiftly.” It was important for AboutIT to partner with an integration solution provider that was not going to slow them down and Synatic did not disappoint.
Buffers are principally a region of physical memory storage used to temporarily store data while moving from one place to another.The use of buffers in Synatic can be likened to a region of physical memory storage used to store or hold data while moving data between systems, either temporarily or persisted. Typically, the data is stored in a buffer as it is retrieved from a source (i.e., a database or another API) or just before it is sent to another flow or solution.
Repetitively loading the same data from a web service or a database can carry significant overhead costs in terms of performance and time. You might also encounter API rate limits that throttle performance and usage. Synatic lets you create and configure many buffers for multiple scenarios of caching data that will help you avoid these constraints.
Common use cases for Buffers would typically be:
• A Cache or, if you will, a super cache – allowing data to be kept current in an in-memory storage
• Recording events over a period of time for tracking purposes.
• Creating an in-memory lookup table and use it as a master quick search list.
• Avoiding rate limits when interrogating data in an API.
To increase the speed at which data was being transferred between applications, a Synatic Buffer was added in between Acumatica, WooCommerec and Salesfore. Data such as customer details, stock, price, and quantity were moved into a Synatic Buffer and both Salesforce and WooCommerce were able to rapidly pull that data from the same set of buffers.
“Whenever Synatic ran into challenges they never approached us with problems, but rather solutions as to how these challenges can be overcome”- Gerrit Olivier
AboutIT’s interactions with the Synatic team were fantastic. As with any collaborative partnership, there are bound to be obstacles that arise along the way. When there were issues, the team was able to speedily resolve them to ensure that the project was completed within the allocated time frame which helped AboutIT deliver on time and within budget. Both partners had to learn how to adapt to each other’s project management styles, as well as the current technology stack. They had to find a common ground first by getting everyone on the same page regarding project scopes, expectations, and time frames, but from that point forward, the partnership led to a positive result and efficient solution building.Olivier said, “Synatic are a very professional team and are well versed in their product. They understand their strengths and limitations and capitalize on this knowledge to not only leverage their strengths but make incremental improvements to the solution they provide. The project that was completed with Synatic was professionally handled, well planned, scheduled, and executed to the tee.”
“The partnership was a true team effort and there was always positive energy around the table to ensure that hurdles were overcome and clients always left happy. Working with Synatic was a very fulfilling experience.” - Gerrit Olivier
