Integrations... How have you made the most of them (SAP, Servers, DAMs, etc.)?

[VictoriaPe]

Hi Workfront Hivemind, I've been wanting to integrate systems we use at my company with Workfront for some time now and am finally getting around to speaking with consultants. We use SAP for operations/ordering and a private server to house product development documentation spreadsheets (We've tried to adapt these into Workfront custom forms/reports but they've proven to be too interactive and complex in format). I'd like to integrate these spreadsheets and SAP with Workfront so that (1) the spreadsheets are visible and editable in a Workfront dashboard (or have a dashboard replicate this spreadsheet) and so that (2) information can be typed in and files uploaded into Workfront and then get sent over to SAP. Since I'm new to this, I know this is a vast frontier and there is a lot of customization that can happen since you can really program anything, but I also know sometimes things also don't always work the way you want or there's an easier software solution. In a longwinded way, I'm really asking, how do you use integrations to support your project processes and make your business procedures more fluid? And, what are the pros and cons you've experienced? Thank you in advance for any insight and experience you share!

[EricLu2]

Hi: We had intended on integrating WorkFront to our financial system - hours from timesheets mostly. Since WorkFront doesn’t do Project Costing (which is okay), we wanted to use the project costing module in our accounting system. We need to know how much our projects really cost, and given some challenges in how WorkFront handles rate changes for users over time, we can’t get an accurate project cost from WorkFront. The developer who designed the integration, as it turned out, created a fragile, difficult to implement architecture and we discarded it. When we discarded that complicated integration, we also discarded bringing project actuals from our Finance system back into WorkFront. We were going to bring non-labor expenses booked to the project in the finance system back as an actual expense in WorkFront. We were going to use AtApp technology and I am convinced it would have worked great. When we shut down the integration to the finance system, we were forced to drop this too, darn it. It would have worked well. I’m not contributing much to your effort, I’m sure, but that’s what happened to us. Thanks! Eric

[KatherineHa1]

We have a one way integration from SAP>Workfront for master data (Client, Job and Employee info) that we bring into both native fields and custom forms. We do our timesheets in SAP, as that is our financial system of record (so billing comes out of SAP), but have recently built a data warehouse to marry actual hours (and rates) from SAP with planned hours from WF to see Burn Rate reporting. If any of this is of interest to you (but sounds different from your goal) - happy to share/discuss more.