In today’s competitive environment, the quest for efficiency has to move beyond the four walls which comprise the company’s premises and should extend to a ‘value chain’ view which takes in partners and suppliers.
That’s according to Jan Lewis, MD of iEnter, who says business to business integration (B2Bi) allows organisations to act in concert to boost not only their individual performance, but that of the broader value chain.
“By electronically connecting your business with that of suppliers, partners and customers and exchanging a variety of information, every company in the resultant chain enjoys the ability to improve planning, synchronise activities and reduce the time taken to source and process goods and services,” Lewis points out.
Far from a new concept, he notes that B2Bi has been used in various forms since the late 1960s. However, he says while it was once the preserve of those organisations which could afford it, the introduction of standards has led to the development of software solutions which enable rapid deployment of B2Bi for more companies than ever before.
That’s driven further by the emergence of the internet and related concepts such as open standards XML (eXtensible Markup Language), web services, service oriented architecture and software as a service (SaaS). “The technology industry never stands still. Solutions which were once incredibly costly are continually put within reach of more businesses –and people – than ever before,” Lewis remarks.
He explains that B2Bi first requires an explicit agreement for cooperation between the companies which are seeking to integrate their systems.
“This is closely followed by a process of understanding what systems are in place in each company seeking to integrate with any others. This will, to an extent, determine what technology is selected to achieve the integration – and, depending on the systems in place, the configuration of the integration is also determined.”
The commonly-encountered spanner in the works, Lewis notes, is the necessity to retain and use legacy systems.
“In an ideal world, every company up and down the supply chain would have the same systems and they would be brand new. In reality, this is never the case. Instead, there are typically systems of various ages and which were never designed to ‘speak’ to other systems. It’s not feasible to replace those systems, so the task of the integrator is to apply new technology to get disparate systems communicating effectively.”
Lewis says successful B2Bi depends on planning, strategy, the right tools expertise. “The B2Bi solution should evolve with the company, with the industry and with the IT industry. It should offer comprehensive functionality, with the flexibility to support third-party software vendors while connecting existing and new systems in a common framework. It should also scale to accommodate customer and trading partner systems.”
B2Bi solutions, he says, can be delivered as on-site deployments, as hosted SaaS implementations (with avoiding any expenditure on software licenses or hardware), or as a hybrid deployment combining aspects of on-premise and hosted solutions.
In the short term, Lewis says companies should focus on how integration can reduce operational costs, increase worker productivity, automate supply chain and improve customer relationships. The second phase of a B2Bi strategy is typically long-term – serving as a roadmap to ensure the business uses integrated systems to realise full potential.
The benefits of B2Bi are well proven, he asserts.
“Companies can realise significant savings with the implementation of EDI and other similar B2B technologies. These technologies allow companies to take advantage of the benefits of storing and manipulating data electronically, reducing or eliminating manual data entry errors and reduce cycle times. In short, B2Bi makes it faster, easier and safer for companies to automate cross-enterprise business processes, dramatically reducing human intervention for faster, more reliable and more profitable transactions.”
