Choosing the Right Data Integration Platform

When it comes to business intelligence and leveraging best-of-class data systems, companies need to look between the cracks to identify competitive advantages of available offerings in the marketplace. A powerful ERP like NetSuite can handle data from a wide range of sources to fuel insights for BI tools while providing a high degree of visibility within a single platform. 

Inevitably, manual work usually accompanies these solutions, and bottlenecks can affect the timeliness, accuracy and efficiency. These areas are where a data integration platform can have a huge impact on your business’s ability to scale – if you make the right investment. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the types of data integration platforms out there, how they can transform your business and the key factors you should look for to make the perfect choice. 

Where data integration platforms make an impact

A data integration (DI) platform optimizes and organizes your data pipelines so you can make the best use of the information you have. Business models built around subscription services typically have to manage large amounts of data from payment, billing and various other sources simultaneously, and these systems may or may not communicate efficiently. That can quickly lead to resource-heavy manual processes that don’t scale well as your business grows. 

NetSuite users are familiar with its data integration functionality – including leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for deeper insights – and additional DI solutions can help you make the most of what it can do for your business. These systems change the game by:

• Extending the native capabilities of current platforms
• Overcoming siloed data in legacy systems
• Preserving data lineages
• Freeing up your team with increased functionality.
• Providing real-time data streams
• Scaling with your company and promoting growth

Selecting an ideal data integration platform will depend on exactly where your business needs the most support. Here are the most common types of DI platforms and the challenges they address.

1. Extract, transform, load (ETL)

An ETL platform pulls data from multiple sources, organizes it into its most usable and optimized form, and then moves it to storage. ETL systems are especially useful when data is siloed between several sources and has to be manually compiled in programs like Excel. This approach introduces errors and redundancies and usually doesn’t scale well, so ETL systems can be valuable investments. 

Once ETL platforms gather raw data, they can transform it in a variety of ways, including:

• Aggregating
• Filtering
• Eliminating redundancies
• Cleansing
• Sorting

Some ETL systems even back up and organize archived data to ensure it’s easy to access as new data is added to storage. 

2. Data lakes

Data lakes store data in a variety of different formats and degrees of structure. They allow end users to draw on its contents for many types of analytical processes, including modeling, forecasting, real-time analysis and powering machine learning systems. 

Data lakes offer a number of advantages over data warehouses, including the ability to import data in real-time without the need to organize or format it beforehand. This is especially valuable when dealing with large quantities of data from mobile apps, devices, social media, subscription billing and similar high-volume lines. By cataloging and storing it in a much less organized format than a data warehouse, tools like big data analytics and machine learning can be deployed to uncover trends and insights in vast quantities of data quickly. 

3. Cloud-based solutions

Cloud-based data integration platforms can deliver similar functionality as ETLs and data lakes without the need for an expensive in-house investment. These systems can extract, store, and transform data from physical systems using cloud architecture, allowing for rapid and cost-effective scaling. 

Cloud solutions are particularly useful for businesses with remote workforces and startups looking for increased functionality. Because these services are online, they’re typically supported by robust encryption and security features. However, there are significant considerations every business needs to evaluate when they use cloud-based data integration. 

• Data mapping is extremely important to prevent inefficiencies and redundancies. 
• Data structure: Not every cloud solution is ideal for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data.
• Scaling for both data and performance varies by platform. 
• Maintenance. Not every cloud-based solution is fully managed, and some maintenance might fall on you.
• Suitability. These aren’t custom systems, and while some are extremely flexible tools, you’ll need to be sure you’ve done your homework.

Methodologies for DI systems

Businesses can leverage data integration systems in a number of ways to optimize their operations, reduce reliance on manual processes, and extend the capabilities of ERPs and business intelligence platforms. These investments can support faster and more efficient workflows across many aspects of a business, and some deliver benefits for multiple use cases at once. 

Here are the key areas where a data integration platform can streamline your workflow if you’re using an ERP like NetSuite:

Billing

Without data pipelines that funnel to one place, there’s a natural limit to the speed and flexibility you can offer for basic functions like billing cadence, pricing accuracy, contract changes and invoice consolidation. When these actions bog down, they create lags in your order-to-cash (OTC or O2C) cycle and headaches for your accounting team. 

An ETL integration can address these issues by pulling data from various systems that would normally have to be compiled manually and organizing it within NetSuite’s native platform. This data integration process makes it much easier to analyze and understand the information you have. It can also unlock additional benefits like invoice automation and faster invoice processing to reduce key metrics like days sales outstanding. 

SaaS provider Sourcegraph faced exactly this issue when they experienced explosive growth in a short period of time. Their manual processes simply couldn’t keep up, and by deploying a data integration platform from Zone & Co, they were able to extend their legacy systems and cut revenue recognition time by 70%.  

Payments

NetSuite offers a high degree of flexibility for your customers by supporting great payment gateway and processing integrations like Stripe. An Automated Clearing House (ACH) keeps processing errors to a minimum, but only if it gets the right data in a timely fashion. Highly customizable subscription plans create a wealth of data like credit and debit memos and contract updates that complicate monthly recurring revenue (MRR) calculations. If data pipelines aren’t optimized, it will be hard for any business to keep up. 

Implementing DI payment solutions to streamline the payment process eliminates time-consuming issues like juggling multiple logins and consolidating data in Excel. By organizing everything with an ETL data integration platform, it’s much easier to track and manage payment data in real time. That ensures you stay nimble as well as compliant with regulations like ASC 606. 

Reporting

Many companies use business intelligence tools like Power BI to demystify the numbers and deliver powerful insights in concert with NetSuite reporting. To maximize their capabilities, businesses rely on many types of data integration processes to generate the most timely and accurate reports possible. 

ETL data integration software like ZoneReporting extends NetSuite’s native capabilities to generate a much deeper and more intuitive business view. These extensive reports can be transferred to tools like Power BI in real time to generate instant insights for your business through modeling and forecasting. 

Data lakes are also useful for storing and analyzing data trends, and any of these services can be cloud-based depending on your business’s budget and growth potential. The results they generate can be used to optimize a wide range of issues for B2B SaaS providers who use subscription and use-based revenue models, including:

• Ensuring accuracy and compliance with Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software. 
• Identifying and preventing revenue leakage.
• Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
• Minimizing Accounts Payable Days and other OTC inefficiencies.

Pick the perfect data integration platform for your business

NetSuite users already enjoy many operational and analytical advantages and data integration solutions that make it easier for businesses to coordinate all their systems can offer huge advantages on the competitive front. The right data integration platform should deliver transparency, speed and accuracy across the order-to-cash cycle, thus eliminating siloed data and giving you a complete view of your business. 

‍Learn more about how a data integration platform can revolutionize your back-office operations, reduce your reliance on manual processes, and ignite your business intelligence tools with clean, secure, and comprehensive data streams that deliver game-changing insights in real time.