#b2b integration

[ds4u]

Simplify trade & boost efficiency with B2B Integration! Learn the benefits & discover top EDI platforms to streamline your business

[siyana2021]

Integrated EDI streamlines business processes by eliminating manual data entry and reducing errors. Cloud-based EDI solutions for Dynamics lower costs and simplify the implementation and maintenance of EDI operations by eliminating in-house data translation and connectivity.

[siyana2021]

HubBroker- Optimizing Partner Onboarding and Management for Better Outcomes

Contact us today to learn more about streamlining trading partner onboarding and how we will help your business reduce errors, accelarate business gains, and increase ROI.

There are hundreds of transactions taking place among partners in B2B enterprises. All this trading needs tremendous IT support for managing various connections, formats, protocols, and policies. Unfortunately, many companies are still struggling to manage trading with partners along with error-prone and cumbersome methods and processes.

A recent study by Ovum, a research firm, found that nearly 40% of enterprises take over 30 days to onboard a new trading partner. Enterprises are finding it difficult to manage hundreds and thousands of partners. In the same report, Ovum also found that an organization could reduce the complications and reap better & faster business outcomes with a centralized approach to trade and getting new partners on board.

Complexities of Traditional Process

As the partnering ecosystem increases, enterprises start moving customizations and manual processes on top of their B2B/EDI system, inviting a more complex environment. This approach demands IT intervention to manage certificate data and add to other business requirements. The IT department requires to connect each partner manually to many applications, resulting in ineffective and redundant processes.

Changes often are to be made- such as partner agreement, roles, policies, connectivity requirements, contact information- the process becomes slow and labor-intensive. Hence, companies suffer from errors, losing partners, and time-consuming processes.

Above all these challenges, companies lack visibility in trading, progress, maintaining relationships, and other activities. In simple words, enterprises are finding it extremely hard to manage and monitor their most valuable and meaningful partnerships.

Finding the Better Way

B2B integrations are rapidly increasing and growing among companies for better outcomes. Initially, companies were hesitant to invest in partner onboarding and management solutions if they knew it. According to research from Ovum, 53 percent of enterprises cited the lack of support for rapid trading partner onboarding as a significant problem with their existing B2B integration solutions.

Moreover, that’s not the only reason why you should use Trading partner management and networking solutions like HubBroker. There are several other benefits, such as below, that help you generate better business outcomes.

- Empowered Business Users: Lessen the burden on IT staff to handle new onboarding partners and maintenance activities. Enable LOB users and partners to create forms to complete the onboarding and update certificates and necessary information. They can define the endorsement focuses, work process steps, and accomplice target partner for updates at once. With a couple of snaps, the suitable trading partners can rapidly give the data and endorse partnering.

- Cost Reduction: This self-administration model opens up IT and diminishes the expenses identified with onboarding and keeping up with connections and partner relationships. Connections and structures can be reused, eliminating excess. IBM estimates indicate that companies can reduce the resources required to onboard new partners by 85% when they use the integration and Partner Engagement solutions such as HubBroker’s Integration solutions.

- Improved Integration: With partnering and management solutions, the IT team can incorporate distinctive partner frameworks to utilize APIs. There’s no compelling reason to set up a manual connection for each partner, which leads straightforwardly into the following benefit- faster time to income.

- Quick Revenue: According to Ovum, partner engagement management solutions reduce onboarding time by 75 percent. This drives one vital advantage: the organizations can start trading with their new partners quicker, further developing income and producing high working capital quicker.

- Satisfied Partners and Customers: Trading partners hope to move rapidly in the digital and computerized era. They need an ideal opportunity to generate income quickly, and a partner engagement management solution allows them to connect and trade in hours or days, rather than weeks or months. An answer like this can go far in expanding partnering and consumer loyalty, and satisfaction.

- Better View of Partner Relationships: One of the issues referred to by another study is that many companies don’t have viability in their trading connections. As well as giving insights into the advancement of activities and partners by executives and LOB managers, a trading partner management solution gives a profound understanding of functional execution and expected risks. For instance, a dashboard can make clients aware of a potential SLA issue. This helps them by limiting business disturbance and permits companies to oversee and manage partner agreements proactively.

- More grounded Security and Compliance Controls: It normalizes the B2B trading system and makes a central storage system for data, documents, and records. The data is scrambled both in transit and at end-user, unlike the unreliable, indiscriminate course of trading significant partner data through email and accounting pages. Furthermore, the solutions give better control by taking care of partner integration values and carrying out repeatable and documented cycles, which can be utilized for review purposes to demonstrate consistency.

When you onboard your customers instantly through automation, you are already putting your best foot forward. First impressions go a long way towards client satisfaction, and expediting the onboarding process can be the crucial start to a lasting and profitable relationship with the members of your digital ecosystem.

Building Strong Trading Relationships

Bringing on new trading partners quickly and efficiently is a precious asset that will place your business as one that is easy to do business with, which will give exponential benefits today and in the future.

Indeed, there will always be some level of configuration and integration you must adapt, but HubBroker’s unified integration platform will have you communicating with your B2B partners quicker than your competition.

Contact us today to learn more about streamlining trading partner onboarding and how we will help your business reduce errors, accelarate business gains, and increase ROI.

[appseconnect]

Features of a Strong B2B Integration Solution | InSync Tech-Fin Solutions

For any business owner thinking about scaling up his business, adopting a B2B integration solution should always be the primary goal. Check this out now!

With the expanding reach of digital technologies catering to businesses, partners and customers, B2B integration has emerged out as one very important way of running the business. For any business owner thinking about scaling up his business, adopting a B2B integration solution should always be the primary goal. Here is everything you need to know!

[johnscutz-blog]

API Bugs that Can Hamstring Your Value Chain

Running an API chain is no easy task, and there are plenty of obstacles to overcome. Check out the most common API bugs that can affect your performance.

Read More...https://dzone.com/articles/api-bugs-that-can-hamstrung-your-value-chain

[johnscutz-blog]

Core Features of Puppet Automation

Puppet, the open source configuration management tool, is still just beginning to dawn with many real time possibilities yet to be explored. The automated administrative engine helps in managing Installations, configuring packages, services, and processes. It further allows development teams in focusing on other development related jobs while ensuring service consistency.

Read More...http://www.instructables.com/id/Fundamental-and-Core-Features-of-Puppet-Automation/

[retailtouchpoints]

Adapting B2B Integration To Support Distributed Commerce

By Peter Edlund, DiCentral

Brick-and-mortar retailers spent decades building infrastructure to guarantee merchandise is on the shelf when customers walk into the store. Unfortunately, store traffic is declining, leaving too much perfectly allocated inventory to get marked down, crushing profitability. To survive, major retailers have shuttered hundreds of underperforming stores. At the same time, they’ve invested in e-Commerce capabilities, supporting the largest growth opportunity for their business.

Today’s distributed commerce environment — with its improved digital shopping technologies and widespread adoption of multiple commerce channels — demands greater supply chain agility to drop-ship merchandise when and where the customer wants it. Now is the time for retailers and their partners to develop the operational backbone to thrive in this environment.

Evolution Of B2B Integration And Collaboration

Distributed commerce requires a different B2B integration strategy, focused directly on customer satisfaction. With a supply chain reconfigured for drop-ship, brands and retailers need a holistic understanding of supply chain operations, supported by automated collaboration, to meet customers’ high expectations for a seamless shopping experience.

Scale B2B Integration To Support Drop-Ship

Retailers have implemented EDI with nearly all of their trading partners while leaving brands, transportation firms, banks and 3PLs free to choose their level of system integration. That’s no longer workable. In a distributed commerce environment, previously large orders for thousands of units have been replaced by individual transactions for each product sold, increasing transaction volume exponentially.

To ensure tighter service levels and reduce the cost of supporting retailers, trading partners need to implement greater integration and automation with their back-end systems. The added investment will not only support drop-ship, it will save time and money by streamlining processes and reducing errors.

Improve Supply Chain Operations With Cloud-based Event Management

Successfully operating a drop-ship environment, where customer satisfaction is determined by collaborative supply chain excellence, puts enormous pressure on every supply chain participant. Unavailable until recently, retailers can utilize cloud-based event management applications to gain greater visibility to supply chain performance to proactively manage service levels and exceptions.

These systems monitor the ever-increasing number of B2B transactions and notify supply chain managers of potential service disruptions. From transactions that don’t get acknowledged to orders that miss their shipment deadline, retailers can use event notification to avoid costly mistakes that lead to dissatisfied customers and lost sales.

Accelerate Supply Chain Collaboration With Big Data

To support drop-ship effectively, retailers need to improve how they share and collaborate with their partners. Supply chains generate a huge amount of data from all of the connections among business partners. For most brands and retailers, this is an untapped resource of rich data. Harnessing supply chain big data using sophisticated analytics is essential to accelerate collaboration and the ability to anticipate problems before they happen.

Aggregating B2B orders and shipments with retail POS and inventory data enables trading partners to gain a clear picture of how various demand signals are influencing supply chain operations. With this insight, brands and retailers can better forecast demand by fulfillment channel and determine drop-ship volume to ensure fast and efficient e-Commerce order fulfillment.

B2B Integration’s New Role In Customer Satisfaction

In their continuing shift to distributed commerce, retailers rely more and more on trading partners to support sales and guarantee customer satisfaction. Amazon has successfully leveraged this model to disrupt the industry. As most retailers race to catch up, B2B integration will play a more important role in their ability to capture more customers and deliver merchandise quickly and efficiently.

[alliedco]

Questions Logistics/Freight forwarding companies should ask themselves when planning an integration strategy - Allied Consultants

1.How do you plan on making cargo services more profitable? Through customer intimacy, operational efficiency or product/service innovation?

Deciding upon a competitive strategy early on in your integration strategy helps to develop an integration solution tailored to meet these objectives. If you are betting on improving operational efficiency, you’ll likely focus on automating processes and work procedures.

2. What have revenues and margins been like the last few years and what do projections look like?

3. How will the cargo company incorporate “Straight through processing” in its operations?

Straight through processing calls for all (common) business transactions to involve no people end to end. This is generally part of a broader Operational efficiency initiative.

  4. How will the freight forwarding or the cargo company make its operations efficient, especially through building relationships in shipper and carrier networks?

This relates to building broader relationships with a targeted consumer segment or group   of customers. Deloitte advises to leverage economies of scope through new combinations of boundary-spanning products/services and information.

5. What companies are key competition for our company and how do we plan on differentiating from them?

Keeping a close eye on the competition, that whether they’re investing more in operational efficiency or service innovation, can also help you identify your strengths and future direction. Accenture identified the key attributes of high-performance logistics & freight forwarding companies. They use IT to maintain 360-degree control along with using new ocean freight links to growth geographies such as Africa.

6. Is this level of planning a formal process at our company?

7. What are key initiatives for the next 1-2 years?

Integration initiatives need a significant commitment of resources, both human and capital. You won’t prefer to start two competing initiatives at the same time.

8. What are key business goals and how does this platform/initiative help you achieve those business objectives?

Always align your integration strategy/initiatives to key business goals that the organization plans to achieve in next 1-2 years.

9. From a sales and marketing perspective, how does that happen right now? Are you expecting to expand to new target markets? 

10. If providing value added services (VAS) is a key objective here, what VAS are of key importance? Supply chain visibility, Customer clearance, Self-service, warranty processing, returns management, light manufacturing?

Original Article: http://www.alliedc.com/questions-logisticsfreight-forwarding-companies-should-ask-themselves-when-planning-an-integration-strategy/