Accelerators: An Overview

Cleo Accelerators are designed to accelerate the building of common integrations incorporating Cleo best practices for integration design. They are a collection of CIC Studio Projects (and other resources) that allow you to more easily and consistently integrate between your system and your trading partner. 

The Projects contain prebuilt Schemas, Rulesets, Business Processes, and other resources used for development, deployment/execution, and testing. This includes mapping tools specific to your integration. Finally, there are also resources necessary to display data in several Cockpit monitoring pages. 

Types of Accelerators

There are two types:

Application (Application <> application): This type of Accelerator provides the necessary resources that allow you to integrate two different applications. For example, you could have an integration set up to retrieve Orders from Amazon MarketPlace (AMP) and then create the corresponding SalesOrder in NetSuite.

Network (Application <> EDI): This type of Accelerator provides the necessary resources that allow you to integrate between an application using EDI documents. An example could be a typical X12 Order-to-Cash operation in which documents (850, 810, 997, 856, 855) are processed with your backend system and Netsuite application.

How it works in CIC

The process of using an integration template follows this basic process.

1. Use the Accelerator UI Wizard.  This is part of an initial setup that obtains Projects and resources.
2. Customize the Projects. Some Projects are read-only and are only referenced by other Projects. Other template Projects, however, require modification based on your particular environment and business needs. This includes mainly Ruleset and Business Process (BP) configuration but may include other resources such as Routes and Envelopers.
3. Deploy Projects.
4. Test your Accelerators. You can test your integration throughout development using several Business Processes included in each Accelerator.
5. Monitor the results.  After deployment, you can monitor activity in the Cockpit and check for errors or other issues to troubleshoot.

Integration Flow Charts and Integration Design Specification Templates

Each Accelerator comes with two important resources.  

Integration Flow Charts: These diagrams represent the business process flows that are supported in the specific Accelerator being used. They are meant to help you understand the details and flow of particular business integrations.

Integration Design Specification: This is a default mapping template for a Transaction between source and target ecosystem entities. The Integration Design Specification describes the transaction type, Data Flow direction, source data, target data, and relevant application version(s). It also includes applicable B2B/API elements and mapping rules.

Both resources can be leveraged for a better understanding of the mapping involved and the business flow supported with the particular Accelerator. These resources can be found in the Doc folder inside the downloaded Accelerator Projects.

Prerequisites

Certain general prerequisites must be met before using Accelerators. These are described below. There are also requirements that apply specifically to different Accelerator types; these are noted in specific Accelerator documentation.

1) Technical Assumption

Effective use of Accelerators assumes the following:

• You are familiar with the development and organization of your external application account.
• You know the particulars of your data and the external processes to manage it.
• You have a general understanding of how to create and share resources, and publish (deploy) integration projects in the CIC Studio. See Core Concepts for additional info.

2) Current CIC Studio 

The CIC Studio must be at version 5.1.16 or higher in order to use Accelerators.  See Downloading the CIC Studio to determine the version of your Studio as well as download instructions. Please contact Cleo Support if you need help.

3) Specialized Server Licensing Required

Accelerators require a specialized server license. Please see your Customer Account Manager. 

Next Topic

• Using the Accelerator UI Wizard