Here are just some of the benefits companies can achieve by modernizing their B2B integration capabilities:
Good relationships are built on trust. And trust is created through honesty and transparency. Modern, innovative technologies make secure, scalable, always-on connectivity possible with all your large and small B2B partners, regardless their level of technological sophistication.
Modernized B2B solutions can also provide greater visibility into what’s happening, and help you prepare for or even prevent any disruptions. You can extend transaction visibility to your line of business staff and your trusted business partners, and provide them easy, self-service access into the status of their transactions. They'll be thrilled when they can get updates quickly at their fingertips, without waiting on IT to research the information for them.
With improved collaboration and responsiveness, you’re not only making an investment in your operations, you’re contributing to positive, productive, permanent relationships.
The average organization is managing:
That's a lot to support and legacy systems can't keep up. With the ability to automate complex processes and support for a wide variety of formats and protocols, modernized B2B solutions enable you to support these requirements with ease. They also ensure fast, and reliable B2B exchanges 24/7/365 by enabling:
The cost of maintaining your own technology infrastructure is high. And the cost of maintaining outdated legacy systems is even higher.
You not only require the staff to run these antiquated operations, but you pay the price of slow performance, costly updates, the inability to easily implement change, and phenomenal complications when trying to integrate with a wide variety of B2B partners.
Modernized B2B solutions help you make a variety of financial improvements:
Change is constant. In a business world that’s moving at the speed of thought, you need to pivot without hesitation. But unless you have modern technology that allows you to adapt quickly to change, or to handle an unexpected onslaught of transactions at high velocity, it’s almost impossible to do.
The ability to keep up with trading partners is a big part of this. Companies now deal with a growing volume and variety of suppliers throughout the world. The average organization is managing over 250 customers, suppliers, and partners. To collaborate effectively, they are implementing modernized tools that break down the restrictions of time, distance and technical maturity. The result is real-time, accurate information exchange for every B2B partner in the ecosystem.
Additionally, when you need to enter new markets or geographies, meet an industry requirement, or connect to new back end systems, a modernized B2B solution can help you adapt quickly to change.
Today’s innovative B2B technologies have built-in capabilities to accommodate evolving standards and provide alerts whenever anything is amiss. You’re protected from risk of fines and are assuring your B2B partners of security.
Historically, the onboarding of partners has been a lengthy, complicated, resource-intensive process, taking weeks or months. This becomes a significant problem when you’re consistently adding new partners or changing information about existing ones. This is a common challenge as 59% of surveyed companies indicate that they onboard new trading partners weekly.
Modern B2B technologies not only help to simplify and accelerate trading partner onboarding, but some can even equip your partners to onboard themselves. These tools offer simple, user-friendly interfaces that allow your partners to complete the process quickly.
This means you don’t need staff to deal with phone calls and faxes, and the re-keying information gleaned from other sources. These capabilities reduce the time, cost, and complexity of onboarding and managing a large number of partners - and gives your partners better control. Your partners are up-and-running in hours rather than days, weeks, or months, and you can both reap the benefits of the relationship by generating revenue immediately.
Modern B2B technologies make it possible to achieve 360-degree visibility into the entire B2B transaction lifecycle. That visibility can be extended beyond B2B system administrators to business staff and even to partners, enabling them to quickly see the status of transactions that are relevant to them.
For example, when an order comes in, a wide range of information has to be visible to every relevant participant in the value chain, from partners to employees to business managers to customers, including:
Having instant visibility into this information not only helps to avoid disruption but also improves customer and partner satisfaction.
In addition, by modernizing B2B integration capabilities, companies can gain actionable insights throughout supply chain processes, enabling them to mitigate risk and resolve disruptions in minutes - not hours or days. It also helps them identify opportunities for improvement, as well as the spot trends that indicate the need for new or improved products and services.
Downtime is expensive to everyone in the B2B ecosystem – in time, money and reputation. A disruption at one point can send ripples of disturbance across the entire supply chain, create compliance issues, reduce revenues, precipitate SLA penalties, and impact customer satisfaction.
Modernized B2B integration systems and networks can ensure reliable, continuous performance and ensure your B2B operations are always available.
The future of business-to-business (B2B) integration is in the cloud. Forward-thinking organizations are transitioning their network infrastructure to a cloud model to reduce cost and complexity. The move is also enabling them to strengthen collaboration with partners and improve agility to meet fast-changing demands at scale.
Modernized B2B cloud services offer flexible cloud options to suit every organizations' requirements and financial resources. Your B2B solution can be hosted and managed in the cloud, hybrid, or on-premise. With a secure, high-performance cloud solution, you can engage and transact with your B2B partners more quickly, and with greater visibility and confidence.
Modern B2B platforms also offer connectivity to other cloud-based applications and technologies via APIs, so you can capitalize on their capabilities as well.