Here are a few considerations to keep in mind while designing your integration solution for Dynamics AX:
- Simplify the overall architecture and try to reduce the number of integrations between applications wherever possible. It is one of the areas that cause recurring issues in production.
- Define clearly the master system for each data element, even though you may have it stored at multiple places. In some cases, this may have to be defined at the field level. For example, a customer master is stored in CRM and Dynamics AX as well. CRM might be the master for all the customer information except credit limit.
- Ideally, you should avoid duplication of data across multiple systems, although in some cases you cannot avoid it for business reasons or for systems to work. For example, customer records are required in both, the CRM system and Dynamics AX. However, you can opt not to integrate the CRM-centric customer information that may not be needed in Dynamics AX.
- Understand and document business SLAs for each integration; think through the impact in extreme situations.
Tip
One of my customers had the inventory getting refreshed into their e-commerce system every 2 minutes. It was okay until the Black Friday weekend. During that 2 minute window, they oversold a product that was being sold below its cost (they only wanted to get rid of the on-hand stock). However, the customer ended up buying more to fulfill the additional orders that were received due to the delays in inventory updates. It is important to understand SLAs and the business impact while designing integrations.
- Using the AIF adapter framework, you can create a custom adapter. Several Dynamics AX customers use custom adapters like FTP, EDI, SQL adapter, and TIBCO adapters used with the AX AIF framework. Our recommendation is to build any such custom adapters if that suits your integration requirement better than these out-of-the-box adapters.
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