Quantcast

Enhance your Integration Capabilities with Bizagi's Connectors

This blog is a recap of April's live Ask the Process Professor session: Enhance your Integration Capabilities with Bizagi's Connectors

One of the biggest challenges when companies decide to start their process automation journey and the modernization of systems is how to handle legacy systems and disparate technologies. Gartner explored the topic in their article ‘7 Options to Modernize Legacy Systems’ and identified that “Digital transformation has made it imperative for application leaders to find effective ways to modernize legacy systems. The biggest challenge? Knowing the risk-to-reward ratio before acting. For many organizations, legacy systems are seen as holding back the business initiatives and processes that rely on them.”

Integration with legacy systems must be a top priority in any discussion surrounding process automation initiatives. Companies need to find intelligent, agile, and flexible ways to make the information stored in these external systems available within any process. It is critical to not only integrate systems, but to orchestrate them in a perfect symphony of people, processes, systems, bots, and data to achieve the best results for the organization.

 

Bizagi Connectors: An easy way to integrate 

Bizagi understands the importance of integration and offers multiple options to facilitate integration with external and legacy systems. One of the most popular and powerful features is Bizagi Connectors. A Connector provides a group of actions available for any process to perform in another application (e.g. create a lead in a CRM, upload a document to a cloud storage service, post media or content in an account, etc.).

Our wide range of Connectors make it possible to connect to a number of external systems and applications to meet any business requirement. You simply select the one that best suits your needs and add it to your project.

Bizagi_connectors.png  

Bizagi provides three types of Connecter: ready-to-use Connectors, native Connectors, and a build your own option.

 

Ready-to-use

The Bizagi Xchange offers ready-to-use Connectors for any project. These Connectors integrate with some of the most common systems used by companies today, including OCR providers, AI, Cloud services, electronic signature applications, and CRM systems. A plus point of this option is that they require minimal configuration, and in just a few simple steps, the integration will be in place and available for any process.

Integrations_2.png

 

Build your own

This is an option available within Bizagi Studio that allows you to create any connector you need for your project. There are multiple ways to create a new connector:

 

Bizagi_API_connectors.png


From a file: A Connector is identified as a file with the extension .bizc. If you have an existing Connector (either because someone created it for a different project or you want to modify one of the connectors from the Xchange), it is possible to upload the .bizc file and adapt the Connector to suit your business needs.

Build your own: This option is selected when a project requires an external system to be integrated that is not available in the Bizagi Xchange. In this case, it is necessary to analyze the external system and select the best option to build a new Connector using the Bizagi Connector Editor. You can create Connectors from scratch, starting templates, or by using an API descriptor through the Connector Editor.

Connector_editor.png


REST: This type of Connector requires no code or programming skills as it uses a proprietary REST framework. The framework connects to APIs, providing standard authentication mechanisms and the most common authentication methods. The Connector Editor has multiple wizards to reduce the time and complexity involved in creation.

Custom: This Connector lets you include any third-party libraries and write your own code. Therefore, building this type of Connector requires programming skills.

Descriptor: Bizagi's Connector Editor offers an option to generate Connectors automatically from specifications described in OpenAPI or RAML. These descriptors allow you to translate an API technical description into a language readable for humans and machines without using code. If the external system you want to integrate into your project has an OpenAPI or a RAML descriptor, you can upload that file, and the Connector will be generated automatically.

Template: Bizagi Connector editor provides the option to generate two types of Connectors from templates; these have 80% of the implementation done and only require you to complete the last 20% to meet the unique requirements of each application.

ABBY Flexicapture: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that lets you convert images, handwriting, or printed documents into encoded text so that you can use this information digitally in IT systems. ABBY’s template includes actions, therefore it is only required to set up outputs.

Power Automate: Microsoft Power Automate allows you to automate manual and repetitive tasks by creating workflows. The Connector template will enable you to trigger Power Automate flows from your business processes through HTTP calls. The template has an action that only needs to configure the input parameters.

 

Native_connectors.png

Native Connectors

These Connectors are available in every Bizagi project. As soon as a new project is created, you will find them in the Expert view, under the External Systems menu.

SAP: As one of the most powerful and used ERPs across organizations with extensive inventories or resource management strategies, Bizagi provides a SAP connector and a SAP Cloud Connector to cover the full spectrum of this ERP.

Microsoft Excel: This program is trusted by companies worldwide to build calculating tools or to reflect a specific business logic. Thousands of employees also use it to perform basic or complex calculations that would otherwise take a lot of time and effort. Bizagi acknowledges the importance of this tool, and that is why the native connector provides a set of operations to read and write on Excel files.

Form Recognizer: This solution offers swift and easy-to-use OCR capabilities. The native connector lets you integrate your automated processes with Form Recognizer, so you can get information from scanned documents, credit cards, or receipts and use it in your processes.


There are multiple options to integrate any external system into your Bizagi project, simply select the one best suited to your needs and let Bizagi orchestrate all of your systems.

 

Hear more from me, the Process Professor

If you’d like to hear more about Bizagi’s Connectors, including their benefits, how to use them to their full advantage, and how to create new ones to fit your specific needs, catch up with my Process Professor session now.

And don’t forget to sign up for the following Process Professor session.

Every month I take a deep dive into one of Bizagi’s critical features in a live session, including a short demo, and answer any questions you have about the Bizagi platform.