There is more to B2B integration than the use of software to integrate new customers. In fact, effective B2B integration requires the cooperative collaboration of a strong Business Process Management (BPM) system in order to reach its fullest potential. The fact is that the execution of B2B integration is directly tied to the streamlining of Operations and IT in onboarding new customers and achieving customer success.
Customer Onboarding is Key
With large organizations, multiple departments are each responsible for playing specific roles in onboarding new clients. What we have learned is that the process of onboarding new customers is as important as actually implementing the integration solution. If your clients are sending a new format of Purchase Orders or customized EDI 214 Shipment notices, who in your team is responsible for setting up that data interface? Who in your team is responsible to check if an existing integration setup can be reused for processing that client’s files? Who is responsible for testing and managing this data integration? Ultimately, how are your tasks routed to different users on your team in order for them to coordinate so that everyone knows who is doing what and when?
For most companies, the answer to most of these questions is pretty much a hodgepodge of ad hoc steps that are not automated. Mostly this process is disjointed and inefficient with manual steps as the primary medium for communication, coordination and the update of progress on customer onboarding. Further, as you attempt to onboard hundreds of new clients, how is it possible to scale this ad-hoc process so that it can handle the variations and complexities of each customer’s data while fast-forwarding revenue?
B2B Meets BPM
The solution to this problem is a unified platform that tightly coordinates user collaboration with the onboarding process on a single platform. Adeptia is the only data integration product on the market that achieves this. With a built-in BPM capability that allows process owners to operationalize customer onboarding, the otherwise complicated process becomes automated, scalable, replicable and manageable. Process owners are able to design, model and automate workflows that help streamline the entire onboarding process.
With Adeptia’s BPM feature, users design rich workflows that route tasks to different groups or systems or, if needed, assign tasks to users for manual review. It also provides real-time user performance dashboards to managers and process owners so that the entire team is aware of the status of each step in a specific customer’s onboarding process. In other words, automated workflows in Adeptia’s B2B solution can help govern how a team works collectively to onboard a new customer. Also, task escalation and reassignment is an important part of Adeptia’s BPM workflow capability. If, for example, a user who is working on setting up a new data map is on vacation, then the manager can reassign that task to another user. All in all, Adeptia provides a clear path towards customer onboarding automation that combines BPM capability with B2B integration.
The Path To Automation
Over time, manual intervention should be removed completely from the integration process for greater efficiency and cost. Typically, the basic steps to onboarding a customer involve the following manual processes:
- Receive – User Manually Checks Email For Incoming Order
- Extract – User Downloads and Manually Reviews the File
- Check – User Manually Checks the Data Completeness
- Lookup/Manage – User Manually Verifies If It Is a Valid Order
- Create Sales Order – User Manually Enters Customer Orders Into the Order Management System
With Adeptia software B2B integration and BPM capabilities, the customer onboarding process can be automated. As part of best practice, we recommend that the automation should be done in phases with some of the tasks remaining manual and then gradually moving to full automation as shown in the process diagram below:
Ultimately, the value derived from operationalizing the onboarding process is multi-fold; here are some of the most important additional value-adds of Adeptia BPM.
- Reduction in Manual Entry of Data and Associated Errors
- Frees Up IT to Work on More Strategic and High-Value tasks
- 100% of Automation Gains by Setting Up Automated Data Feeds
- Automated Workflow for Operations to Setup New Customers in Adeptia
- Allows Various Departments to Collaborate in Adeptia to Create and Manage New Data Feeds
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