Chip eServices Blog

Our core product, myRMA.net, is a vertical market product. It does one thing very well. It doesn’t run your business. You need an ERP system to do that. So integration is important between myRMA.net and your ERP system is important. How does myRMA.net integrate with ERP systems? We have developed a technology that enables us to develop integrations easily and quickly and we call this technology, ChipTalk. Services Orientated Architecture (SOA) is the industry term for integration using Web services. ChipTalk uses SOA principles. A phrase I have started to hear lately is a ‘Software Mash Up’ to describe the SOA concept.

First of all, what are the integration points necessary to integrate an after sales returns management system to an ERP system? Automated Credit Note processing and Sales Order generation for exchange merchandise are usually the first two Integration points. Integration is therefore based on transactions. myRMA.net is constructed based on a transaction engine with a finite set of well defined transactions. Any one of these transactions can be used to trigger an integration point.

myRMA.net has a transaction engine with about 25 very well defined transactions. Creating an RMA is a transaction, for example, and receiving an RMA at a Service Centre is another transaction. Integration is all about replicating transactions in one system with transactions in the integrating system. Depending on whether ChipTalk initiates or responds to the integration there are two diifferent integration methods.
a) If ChipTalk initiates the integration then the occurance of a transaction in myRMA.net automatically triggers the execution of a script that performs the integration.
b) If ChipTalk responds to an integrating system then it exposes a Web service for each transaction so that another system can create a matching transaction in myRMA.net.

In future blogs, I will describe how ChipTalk works in greater detail.