Paul Kilduff: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Paul Kilduff. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Kilduff: Enterprise resource planning is a way to get all aspects of your business, from the warehouse to the sales force, on the same page or database. Ted Dively of Group D Communications tied an existing in-house database for a client into a larger back-end database system. Ted, how did you do that?

Ted Dively: It’s pretty easy, Paul. Actually, one of my database designers who’s a FileMaker Pro expert took an existing FileMaker Pro database that we had taken on responsibility for. Someone else had hooked it up years ago for a company here in San Francisco, a very small toy--not manufacturer but Idea Lab, they come up with toy designs and then license. That’s what they do. We took their existing database and we hooked it up to a larger MySQL, it could have been MS SQL but a larger back-end SQL database using tools that allowed us to do that. So now, not only can these folks look at their own data in their own existing FileMaker database but they can interact with and manipulate the data of the larger enterprise system that’s running on SQL and it’s actually geographically separate from them as well. We were working with a designer-programmer who was doing the other side of the stuff, who was based in Australia. So we actually got to work from two different sides of the world on getting two separate sets of data to talk to each other without having to break apart everything and rebuild it from scratch. The idea was to say, “What kind of tools do we have already and how can we take the data that exists with these tools and have it talk to the SQL, the big database on the backside?”

Kilduff: A world away.

Dively: A world away and that’s what we ended up doing. We ended getting an SQL connector, if you will, to have the FileMaker database talk to the larger back-end database and everybody’s happy! And that is a real simple example of taking separate sets of data from separate kinds of systems and linking them together in a way that allows everyone to see, report, and manipulate.

Kilduff: And no jet fuel was involved.

Dively: Not even a little bit. No, everybody got to sit on their hinds and keep doing what they do.

Kilduff: Send your feedback on this show and suggestions for topics and guests to podcasts@allbusiness.com. I’m Paul Kilduff, thanks for listening.