Business Process Integration (BPI) Defined: Benefits and Steps

Enterprises depend on repeatable business processes to help them scale operations such as onboarding and paying employees, closing the books, procuring supplies, conducting marketing campaigns, and selling products. With the proliferation of applications, data, and operational innovations, these processes have become more elaborate and rigorous in recent years.

IT systems enable business experts to define, govern, and automate workflows that depend on increasingly large volumes of data. These systems are often a diverse mix of applications and databases running on-premises and across cloud providers.

Integrating business processes has become a prerequisite for innovating with advanced analytics and intelligent automation. But to achieve those goals, enterprises need to connect the applications and data sources that underpin those processes, even when they span multiple clouds. Only then can they fully take advantage of AI and other cutting-edge technologies to glean insights from real-time data streams, ease collaboration, and eliminate time-consuming manual processes.

What Is Business Process Integration (BPI)?

Business process integration involves connecting silos of automation and data. In practice, this requires the event-based synchronization of applications, data, and partner ecosystems.

The average enterprise uses more than one thousand applications, with tens of thousands of interfaces, to manage functions such as finance, HR, sales, marketing, customer service, supply chain, manufacturing, and strategic planning. Synchronizing these applications and data, including those managed by partners, is increasingly necessary for companies looking to cut costs, boost productivity, improve customer relationships, develop game-changing new products, and ultimately drive profitable growth.

Key Takeaways

• A lack of integration between the applications and data involved in today’s business processes can limit an enterprise’s capacity to gather, analyze, and trust the data needed for timely, informed decision-making across departments and value chains.
• The skyrocketing value of data, and rapidly evolving technologies that enable automation, have heightened the imperative to unify business processes.
• Business process integration (BPI) is necessary to take full advantage of advances in data analytics, generative AI (GenAI), automation with AI-powered agents (agentic AI), and natural language processing.
• There are several methods for connecting applications and data sources, including the native integration in unified software suites, application programming interfaces (APIs), integration platforms, B2B protocols, secure file transfer, and robotic process automation.
• BPI is the foundation for business automation with cutting-edge tools—such as GenAI, agentic AI, and robotic process automation (RPA)—that reduce the need for human intervention to execute many repetitive tasks. This enables workflows to run faster, with fewer errors, at lower cost.

Business Process Integration Explained

Imagine what happens when a company onboards a new employee. The hire might be approved by their manager in the company’s ServiceNow application, and then that event needs to be communicated to an HR system, such as Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management or Workday. The new employee also needs to be entered into a system to manage payroll, such as ADP, and then, perhaps, into a custom system that grants access to facilities and IT systems. This is a simplified description of one of the most common enterprise business processes.

For a workflow to effectively automate the full onboarding process rather than just distinct segments, all these applications must be able to signal events and pass data seamlessly between one another in real time, with the orchestration based on business policy. Only with this level of integration can the end-to-end process be automated to synchronize data across all business applications involved.

Onboarding is one of potentially thousands of business processes that span disparate applications, data systems, and clouds. It’s not uncommon to find some combination of Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow in enterprise IT portfolios. In addition to modern cloud services, most enterprises still run licensed and highly customized on-premises applications, some of which are too important, and brittle, to retire immediately. They also use a variety of cloud-based infrastructure and data management services, analytics tools, personal productivity applications, email, and instant messaging apps.

While it’s nice when systems can be connected out of the box, that’s usually possible only when applications are procured from a single vendor or those that have close partnerships. More often, a layer of connectivity is necessary to link applications, their data, and the critical business processes they orchestrate.

Why Is Business Process Integration Important?

Several trends in modern business make BPI more important than ever before: the surging value of data, end-to-end automation, and data integrity.

The proliferation of data sources, including from Internet of Things and mobile devices, combined with the advent of technologies such as AI, makes it possible to improve decision-making using data like never before. But enterprises can realize the full value of their data only when decision-makers across the organization can access and trust the data sources tied to distinct processes.

End-to-end automation is another trend driving integration of business processes. Processes, and the data generated by them, need to be coordinated with each other before technologies such as AI and RPA can be effectively applied to help them run more efficiently and be less susceptible to human error.

BPI is also a good way to build and protect the integrity of data. With siloed applications and data systems, it’s more likely critical data will fall out of sync and therefore be less reliable. Modernizing with integration and automation helps build trust in synchronized data used by decision-makers, whether humans or AI-powered applications.

How Does BPI Work?

BPI works by simplifying connectivity and unifying workflows across previously disparate activities. In practice, that requires connecting all the applications that govern those end-to-end processes and enabling those applications to share the data they generate.

When different applications are part of a common suite, or jointly developed by software vendors with close partnerships, these integrations can work “out of the box.” Otherwise, enterprises typically rely on a wide range of approaches and protocols to query and synchronize applications: APIs, secure file transfer, B2B integration, and other methods. There are also various techniques for breaking down data silos, such as sharing access to operational data stores, data lakes, and centralized knowledge repositories using data adapters. No matter the method, the goal remains the same: to synchronize systems of record and intelligence.

Types of Process Integration

There are several ways to connect the applications and data systems that support vital business processes. Most enterprises opt for one of three approaches, depending on their preferred technology vendors, their existing application portfolios, the limitations of their legacy systems, and their evolving business needs.

1. Native

Some large enterprise software vendors offer comprehensive application suites that run many business processes, such as accounting, HR, sales, inventory, and supply chain, within a common framework. These applications integrate natively, meaning they connect to each other by design and often share a common user interface. A unified application suite removes most barriers to BPI within the adopted modules.

2. API

Application programming interfaces are the most common component of “non-native” integration strategies. APIs enable disparate systems to communicate by passing requests and responses between each other. Many applications expose built-in APIs (usually using the REST API architecture), allowing outside systems, be they custom-developed or purchased from ISVs, to directly access their processes and data. But not all applications and data sources expose APIs, and not all APIs are comprehensive enough to meet an enterprise’s integration needs.

3. Third party

Several software vendors offer integration platform as a service to bridge application and data systems. These platforms, which use APIs or other application and data integration technologies to abstract underlying technical details, free developers to focus on higher-impact process automation. Most integration platforms offer a visual interface to configure connections, with engines that implement that business logic under the hood. Third-party vendors also sell RPA tools that connect systems by training robots to interact with user interfaces much as a human would.

Benefits of Business Process Integration

Unifying business processes with connected applications and shared data sources can yield significant benefits that encourage enterprises to quickly overcome the underlying integration challenges. In an era of big data, AI, and hyperconnectivity, these benefits have become business imperatives.

• Increased automation. Once business processes are integrated, comprehensive workflows can be automated with technologies such as AI and RPA. For example, agentic AI chatbots can be introduced into communication channels, and customers can be empowered with self-service capabilities on web and mobile devices. But events and data need to seamlessly flow between different systems, such as from procurement to billing and inventory, before repetitive processes can be automated.
• Upgraded collaboration. Enterprises want their business units, and the teams within them, to work together more productively. But the benefits of the latest communications tools are diminished when they can’t connect to information systems and access trusted data from integrated business processes. A production manager might want her collaboration platform to provide end-to-end visibility into a workflow that spans supply chain, inventory management, and manufacturing systems, with events within that workflow triggering notifications through systems such as Slack and email. Collaboration doesn’t include just humans—AI-agents and chatbots are increasingly part of the team.
• Data integrity. Enterprises that don’t integrate their business processes run the risk of mismanaging their data. Data silos are much more likely to contain duplicative, out-of-date, and missing data. Integration is necessary to keep data sources synchronized.
• Enhanced security. Data leaks are more likely to occur when there are multiple data repositories and managers of them. Integrating business processes makes it easier to standardize security protocols, reuse components vetted by central security teams, and adhere to consistent policies and best practices.
• Reduced compliance costs. Integrated business processes leave a clearer audit trail, making it easier—and less expensive—to address financial, security, privacy, labor, and other laws and regulations. With audit-ready automation, BPI opens the door to introducing AI into the governance, risk, and compliance processes, adding further safeguards by helping reduce errors while cutting costs.

Common Business Process Integration Challenges

Business process integration is of critical importance to most enterprises, but pitfalls abound. The root of most challenges is the complexity of the systems to be integrated—that is, the large number of points of connection throughout diverse application and data environments that must be able to expand and evolve over time.

• Scaled connections. It’s usually not that hard to create a custom interface from one application or database to another. But most companies run thousands of business processes spanning thousands of business systems. Managing the point-to-point complexity—and the thousands of points of failure—across those systems is where BPI becomes error-prone, manually intensive, and expensive.
• Disparate infrastructure. If all your systems run on the same infrastructure, it’s much easier to connect them through APIs and other integration technologies. For that reason, born-in-the-cloud startups can sometimes skirt business process integration challenges. But most enterprise IT departments don’t have that luxury, given that they run their processes in a mix of cloud and on-premises systems using services from multiple cloud vendors. These distributed, multicloud environments inevitably introduce technical complexity when connecting applications and data.
• Functional silos. Functional silos, where different business units within an organization independently procure and maintain their own IT systems, foster their own data silos, which are hard to break down. These isolated data repositories tend to have divergent data schemas and structures, semantic models, logging, and timing systems that weren’t designed to be used together in a way that maintains accurate, complete, and trusted data over time.
• Change management. An enterprise IT stack is always in flux. Systems need to be patched and updated, new data sources and applications are adopted, and there’s a constant impetus to introduce cutting-edge technologies (such as chatbots and other forms of generative AI) into existing workflows. Acquisitions bring the added challenge of assimilating different stacks. Business process integrations must be future-proofed with a comprehensive platform flexible enough to accommodate these inevitable changes. That’s often tricky with legacy systems that are highly customized.
• Divergent integration strategies. Partner companies often aim to integrate their joint processes, but they may want to pursue different integration strategies. Disagreements among allied businesses as to integration architectures and protocols can stem from the unique regulatory requirements of specific industries, or just from preferences motivated by IT teams and legacy systems. For example, a company might want to implement API integrations with all its partners but find that some suppliers or distributors can send rates or track shipments only by EDI methods because their systems exchange documents in standardized formats.

Application Integration vs. Data Integration

BPI comes down to connecting applications and data. While these are related concepts—as applications generate, access, and store data—there are important distinctions.

Application integration deals with orchestrated business processes that span discrete operational systems of record. Examples include onboarding a new employee, in which human capital management and payroll systems need to be connected, and converting an opportunity into an order, in which lead generation, sales, and financial systems need to seamlessly exchange information. The integration is typically event-based, whereby one system triggers an operation to access another using an API or other type of connector. Scheduled, asynchronous application connectivity is another common pattern.

Data integration involves unifying the underlying data sources used for analytics and machine learning. An increasingly popular approach is to create a shared data repository, such as an operational data store, data warehouse, or data lake, that serves as a staging area to validate, enrich, and audit integration events across systems of record and intelligence. Techniques such as extract, transform, and load (ETL), its ELT variant, streaming, and real-time data replication are used to populate these kinds of shared databases. When unifying all data within a single repository isn’t a preferred option, data adapters can be used to integrate data contained in isolated databases.

Business Process Integration Example: Intelsat

Intelsat integrated its satellite and terrestrial communications networks into a software-defined 5G network to provide broadcast television and radio and broadband internet services to more than two billion people worldwide.

But the systems those services ran on were patched together with bespoke connectors. There were single points of failure, file- and batch-based integrations that saw degraded performance with larger data sets, and a growing dependence on employees with distinct skill sets to manage hundreds of point-to-point integrations.

Intelsat wanted a single integration platform that could connect 160 databases; more than 100 on-premises, cloud, and web applications; and partner systems. Moreover, the satellite services provider wanted to be able to design those integrations across its complex portfolio within a low-code, visual environment that would be easy to maintain as the company automated more business processes.

The project called for a solution that could seamlessly pass data among financial, supply chain, HR, sales, customer service, and other applications from multiple providers, as well as Intelsat’s own proprietary customer service and billing systems. Data pulled from terrestrial facilities, multi-orbit satellites, and large telecom customers had to be integrated into these processes. And the integration fabric would have to be flexible enough to incorporate business process changes and new systems already in the planning stages.

By adopting Oracle Integration, Intelsat gained unified connectivity management and built-in governance and security. The platform allows Intelsat to confidently upgrade its many cloud and on-premises applications with minimal integration disruptions, speeding up deployment of new systems into production environments. Oracle Integration also cut Intelsat’s integration costs in half by charging only for services the company actually uses.

How to Start Business Process Integration

Launching a BPI initiative can be daunting, especially for companies running large numbers of mission-critical applications and databases. Here’s where to start.

1. Prioritize Processes

A large application portfolio isn’t going to be integrated in one fell swoop. Enterprises should begin by ranking processes in priority order—including those that extend outside the organization—that need to connect to each other to deliver critical business outcomes. For example, a company might see a looming problem if it can’t unify its invoicing and billing processes, or if a critical supplier can’t seamlessly feed data into its procurement or inventory management systems.

2. Earn Executive Buy-In

Identify business leaders likely to sponsor BPI projects, especially those new to their positions who want to drive change at the outset. Executive buy-in is critical to securing funding for BPI projects and pushing them over the finish line.

3. Map Workflows

It’s important for business leaders to visualize the end-to-end workflows that need to be implemented through process integration. This can be done through business process mapping, in which these workflows and their integration architecture are clearly diagramed on flow charts. Map the existing integrations, then demonstrate how connecting those disparate processes into a larger fabric will enable new use cases, productivity benefits, and greater scalability.

4. Select Integration Approach

There are many methodologies and technologies for connecting applications and databases to orchestrate end-to-end business processes. The best ones for any enterprise depend on its business priorities, operating methods, and existing IT systems and architecture. Some companies will begin and end the project with native integration, seeing the advantage of sourcing all their mission-critical applications from a single vendor. Others will look to build custom connectors with APIs or take advantage of a cloud PaaS environments.

5. Think Forward

BPI initiatives are never really complete, so they always should be future-proofed. New applications and data sources eventually need to be incorporated into existing business processes. Adopt an integration strategy that relies on methodologies that can be iterated, so you don’t have to start from scratch when adding new systems later on.

Start Integrating Business Processes with Oracle

Oracle offers a broad range of solutions for integrating business processes depending on each organization’s needs, capabilities, and plans. That starts with Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, the industry’s most comprehensive suite of enterprise applications, built to natively integrate “out of the box.”

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides enterprises with an extensive array of integration services to help them securely connect all their applications and data sources, laying the groundwork for automating business processes and taking advantage of AI and advanced analytics. OCI offers application integration capabilities, including a visual development platform for connecting cloud and on-premises applications with prebuilt adapters for leading SaaS offerings, enterprise messaging, B2B protocols, and multicloud and data services, as well as native access to Oracle’s extensive suite of applications.

Once applications are connected, Oracle Autonomous Database Data Studio can be used to transform, enrich, and govern the data that flows across them to further support business process integration. Enterprises are taking advantage of these intuitive data tools directly built into Oracle Autonomous Database to train models for use in analytics, securely share data, and develop custom apps for the orchestration of complex business processes.

Complementing this data integration portfolio is OCI GoldenGate, which offers real-time data replication for fault-tolerant operations and online migrations. With GoldenGate, enterprises can design, execute, and monitor their data replication and even analyze streaming data without needing to allocate or manage compute environments.

Business Process Integration FAQs

How is business process integration related to business process automation?

Before an enterprise can automate end-to-end business processes, the systems and data sources these processes run on must first be connected. Business process integration lays the groundwork for business process automation.

What are three basic ways of integrating systems?

Native integration connects application suites from a single vendor. APIs allow disparate applications to communicate by passing requests and responses between each other. Third-party platforms allow visual design of an integration fabric with little or no code needed to handle the underlying connectors.

What is application integration?

Application integration deals with orchestrated business processes that span multiple operational systems of record. Consider onboarding a new employee, where the new hire’s information needs to be added to an HCM application, then seamlessly passed to a payroll system and then on to a facilities access system. The integration is typically event-based, whereby one system triggers an operation to access another using an API or other type of connector.

What is data integration?

Data integration involves unifying data sources. This can be done by creating a shared data repository to support a harmonized view of data or knowledge, such as a data warehouse or data lake, or by using data adapters to connect separate data repositories.

How does robotic process automation support integration?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is used to build and deploy software robots trained to simulate how humans manually interact with user interfaces. Enterprises can use the technology to integrate processes by having RPA bots automate repetitive tasks across systems of record.