Alfa, the developer of Alfa Systems, an enterprise software platform for providers of automotive, wholesale and equipment finance, published a new paper on best practices in systems integration, called Integration – Leveraging the Power of an Open Platform.

Part of Alfa’s Innovation in Implementation series, discusses how best to approach the integration aspect of a systems transformation project, including the prioritization of features and portfolios, the alignment of various teams, the understanding of data and the design of integrations that are easy to build, change and maintain.

Previous papers in the series, which guide decision-makers and project leads on how to approach modern enterprise software implementations, have discussed phased implementations and complex data migrations.

“Modernizing your core platform can disrupt point-to-point integrations, which may have been developed over many years,” Miro Torma, project manager at Alfa and co-author of the report, said. “It follows that their reimplementation, with all functionality retained or improved upon, is a key project challenge. Leveraging the Power of an Open Platform can not only help other implementers through that challenge, but also ready them for longer-term success.”

“We always place an emphasis on partnership and teamwork, with our strength and experience in both platform and delivery complementing the vision of the client,” Ryan Fong, solution architect and co-author of the report, said. “In this series, we’re sharing our full experience for the benefit of those embarking on a systems implementation, and those who are focused on integration will recognize the challenges we address in this paper.”

In the Innovation in Implementation series, Alfa’s experts draw on their talent and experience to discuss ways in which agility can be used to deliver quickly and often. They present the main challenges to consider when operating within a complex systems landscape with many interdependent factors that aren’t easy to separate into manageable chunks.

Future papers will explore how best to iterate and keep delivering value through effective partnering approaches, accelerated implementations and powerful hosting and managed service strategies.