At the Helm Integrations: If You Build it, They Will Come

As my friends and family and, soon hopefully you – my faithful blog readers – know, I’m a fan of a good pop culture reference, especially if it comes from the 80s (the best decade to have “grown up” in!). So, as I sat pondering how to begin this post on integration standards and why they’re important to IQN’s clients and partners, the first (ok, really the 5th or so) thing that came to me was the classic tagline from 1989’s Field of Dreams: If You Build It, They Will Come. In the movie “it” was a baseball field hacked out of a cornfield and “they” were 1920s era ball players; in our case “it” refers to standardized in- and outbound integrations and “they” are satisfied clients and partners. This post will describe the types of standard integrations that IQN has implemented and the benefits they bring to users of our VMS.

IQN Standard Client Integrations & Benefits

IQNavigator has long led the market in developing bespoke integrations to and from client systems. Our ability to be flexible and develop to client standards, reuse existing integrations developed for other software products, minimize client effort, and implement all of the above quickly and with quality is second to none. That said, as the VMS marketplace matures, more and more prospective and existing clients are asking us to provide standard integrations based on both IQN and general technology best practices. These standards are especially helpful to clients with diverse internal systems where no common input and output files exist.

This demand led us to create our developer portal – Developer.IQN.com – as well as a suite of standard web-service based integrations for all common in- and outbound integrations. This suite includes, among other things, integrations such as inbound user and cost center loads as well as outbound worker/provisioning/security feeds (I know that last one is a mouthful, I’m sure I’ll devote an entire post to that type of integration at some point in the future!). Because these integrations are based on widely adopted RESTful web services technology and because how to subscribe to these services is well documented on Developer.IQN.com, connectivity between IQN and client systems can quickly be established with a minimum of effort by either party. This, in turn, leads to faster and cheaper implementation or expansion projects!

End-to-End Partner Integrations

It’s important to IQN’s MSP and staffing supplier partners that they’re able to fill client requisitions with high quality candidates as quickly as possible. IQN is always looking for ways to help them do that, sometimes that’s through improved user-friendly functionality, but, in this case, we’re doing it via integrations that connect IQN to back office recruiting and invoicing systems from end-to-end. These integrations improve supplier efficiency by eliminating the time (and mistakes) that data entry into multiple systems takes and improve quality by allowing recruiters to focus on filling jobs with the best candidates.

As of today we support a variety of HR-XML based web services that allow suppliers to:

  • Retrieve requisitions from IQNavigator (across the entire client base that they serve)
  • Send candidates into IQN to fill those requisitions
  • Retrieve expenditures (timecards and expenses) to facilitate reconciliation and payment

In the near future we’ll add support for assignments and invoicing as well! As with the client integrations, support and documentation about supplier integrations is available through Developer.IQN.com.

That should give you a picture of the benefits that standardization brings to the integration arena; IQN will continue to innovate in this area and expand our offerings, as we truly believe that because we built it…you know the rest!

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