Features and benefits
All-under-one-roof type of platforms today usually all have the same problem that data needs to be stored in the platform itself (or worse Excel), forcing the company to either drop their current tools or make complex ongoing data synchronization. Unifront provides a simpler, more reliable, and much less invasive alternative.
It works with your current tools instead of replacing them.
Easy overview
Data is searched and shown in a unified way regardless of source and format.
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User-friendly visuals
Data can be shown in many different ways such as grids, timelines, gantt charts, etc.
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Custom data sources
Any standard API can be used as a data source. So can most DBMS', and custom data.
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Unique data insights
Data from separate systems can easily be combined and shown in the same widgets.
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Always real-time data
UniFront always shows live data directly from the source system. We only store metadata.
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Interactive
Actions can be added to widgets to manage data directly in the source system.
Portal
A modern unified interface for your end users to order and manage their services regardless of where you handle their requests
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Company service portal
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Unified knowledge search
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One-stop requestables
Operations / Leaders
A merged view of data currently located in multiple systems/tables within a system. Ideal for operational employees or leaders.
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Task/Employee planning
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Live workload overview
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Cross-system event tracking
Ad-hoc
Some processes require data from multiple systems to be viewed simultaneously either as a one-off job or continuously.
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Data validation
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System upgrades or versioning
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Legacy/Gui-less systems
Easy setup
Connect APIs, databases or create custom tables from which to select your data.
Enable specific data from your sources (eg. api methods, sql searches...)
Setup your widgets with any of your enabled data definitions
Collect multiple widgets in dashboards and build your user portal(s)
Publish your changes to allow users to see your new and improved setup!
Widgets
Widgets is our term for an interactive component that visually shows data. They range from searches, grids, tables, doughnuts ,and piecharts, to more advanced ones such as timelines or gantt charts. All of them are configurable, and can work on data from multiple systems combined.
Why
UniFront was created for companies of any size and business area. Below you can see the general problems we solve, use-cases, and a comparison to current alternatives
Integrations are hard
Anyone who has done and works with software integrations will know that even the simplest ones are time-consuming, costly and notoriously unreliable. Out-of-sync data, manual errors, and missing information, are just a few of the reasons that integrations are often abandoned immediately.
A new approach
There is no silver bullet for doing data integrations and we don't intend to replace large ticket-based stateful data exchanges. As stated in the features section above, UniFront is meant to be a better alternative to lightweight integrations and swivel-chair work. We encourage collecting all "lightweight" multi-tool work in one place.
The swivel-chair problem
As a result many employees often have to log in, work and even duplicate data in different systems. This is incredibly inefficient and unreliable, but unfortunately also very common due to the cost or complexity of unifying data in a single system.
A supporting tool
Below is a brief description of the main data integration options today and how UniFront can support these.
1. Centralized
A centralized platform often provides the ability to handle any data uniformly and thereby avoid many integrations altogether. The devil is in the details though. These generic platforms often result in a range of customized solutions which may give maintenance headaches down the line.
2. Distributed
Keeping data and operations in smaller specialized tools can a better user experience for employees. However, a lot of time and resources is usually spent integrating and formatting data between systems and the risk of data inconsistencies is very high. The complexity also increases exponentially with each new system added.
3. Reports
Another popular data integration approach is to use reporting tools. These can be extremely useful but are usually not well suited when a live or urgent overview is needed. Furthermore a lot of data transformation is usually required and sometimes even manual exports and excel macros are involved.
UniFront
With UniFront we have tried to combine the best of these three "classic" approaches. We try to:
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Unify live data as in the centralized approach
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Allow the functionality benefits of having distributed software tools.
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Having a single view of cross-system data as with reports.
