Change detection in Dynamics AX, without touching Dynamics AX

A deadline before the next sales cycle

The project had a fixed date. The integration had to be finished inside a specific window, before the next quarter’s sales cycle started, which rules out most of the architecture-astronaut options straight away.

“Our main concern was speed,” says Jani Kettula, IT project manager at ReadSoft AB in Sweden. The team was surveying integration products on the market when they came across Rapidi: “It seemed like an easy-to-use solution that empowers you to get up and running quickly, and that is what we needed.”

The second concern was subject-matter depth, and that one decided it.

If you are looking for a superior and professional Microsoft Dynamics AX integration with salesforce.com then Rapidi is the choice. Rapidi knows a lot more about integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX than all the reviewed vendors. That gave us the confidence that we were in good hands with Rapidi.

Jani Kettula, IT Project Manager at ReadSoft AB, Sweden

Why AX change detection is the hard part

Moving data out of an ERP is easy once. Moving only what changed, every few minutes, forever, is the real problem — and updates in Dynamics AX are hard to detect from the outside. The standard workaround is to program inside AX so it records its own changes, which adds a customisation the ERP team then owns for the life of the system.

Rapidi’s Mirror technology sidesteps that. It keeps its own picture of the source data, works out what moved, and transfers the difference. Nothing is added inside AX.

Kettula, who had worked with Dynamics AX for years before this project, treated that as evidence rather than a feature: it shows, he says, that Rapidi has the in-depth knowledge around Dynamics AX and a real understanding of the issues with the AX database. For ReadSoft the practical effect was frequency — a large amount of data, synchronised as often as every five minutes, with no code in AX to maintain.

What crosses, and in which direction

Accounts move both ways and stay consistent in every system. New accounts are created in Salesforce and pushed into AX. Products and solutions with their prices go the other way, so the catalogue and every price list in Salesforce come from the ERP rather than from a spreadsheet somebody maintains.

Opportunities in Salesforce become quotes in AX, which is where the order process begins. Open sales orders, from both direct clients and partners, are transferred back into Salesforce for visibility and updated there whenever anything changes in AX. Sales history and payment history sit under each account.

Support cases were imported from RightNow into Salesforce so an account manager could see open cases on the account, with the plan to retire RightNow in favour of Salesforce Service Cloud and run everything from one place.

Rapidi’s ability to understand the client’s needs and challenges is what sets them apart from their competitors.

Jani Kettula, IT Project Manager at ReadSoft AB, Sweden

Partners’ customers count too

One detail is specific to a company that sells through partners: ReadSoft holds its partners’ customers in the system as well as its own, because it needs that information to issue a licence.

That doubles the reason for the data to be right. A record that only exists in the ERP is a licence somebody cannot grant, and a support case nobody can attach to an account.

What management got

The previous CRM gave some consistency, but without real-time integration the up-to-date number was never quite at hand when a marketing or sales decision needed it.

With the integration in place, management can compare subsidiaries against each other on figures that come from the same source. Sales, support and product management read the same account in the same system. Account managers pull up customers and their open cases without asking anyone.

Rapidi is the missing link for us to be able to improve our internal processes and grow our business.

Jani Kettula, IT Project Manager at ReadSoft AB, Sweden

Kettula is careful about what he credits. The product is stable, flexible and fast at synchronising, he says, but that is only half the problem solved — the other half is understanding the how and the why well enough to guide a customer to the right design. That, in his account, is why they chose Rapidi.

ReadSoft has been a pioneer in invoice automation since the 1990s, when it first brought free-form technology for invoice processing to market. It went on to become a global leader in business document process automation, with more than 2,500 accounts payable solution applications worldwide, more than double the total of all major competitors combined. More about the company at readsoft.com.