In the first part, I discussed what all a standard B2B process entails. Integrating B2B elements with manual home-grown approaches can be a daunting challenge for enterprises. In this part, I will cover some relevant pitfalls of conventional B2B integration approaches:
Lack of Collaboration: One often reported hurdle in traditional B2B integration is lack of collaboration. Underlying outmoded approaches don’t scale up to support constantly rising partner requirements, thus causing knowledge gaps. Inability to build new interfaces, onboard partners, and collaborate with technologically advanced trading partners creates setbacks for enterprises.
Lack of Visibility: Without a centralized interface, it becomes difficult to get visibility into partner networks, customer data, and supplier applications. Because of manual, disparate or non-existent processes, enterprises fail to get important details related to supply chain and sourcing processes. As a result, they often fail to discover delays, risks, and quality failures.
Zero Data Access: Cloud applications have different design models and architecture than legacy applications. Problems emerge when traditional enterprise applications need to publish data that can be consumed by a myriad of cloud applications. Silos make it difficult to access data for equally siloed IT teams. It becomes hard to expose or access certain types of data in a B2B environment.
Slow Onboarding: There are a number of factors which delay customer data onboarding. Most of the time is spent on evaluating new clients, setting up processes, ensuring agreement on legal terms, and adhering to compliances. IT needs to get involved in setting up connections and defining onboarding rules with partners. Teams face debilitating errors and outages while manually deciphering elemental data to integrate and expose it across the ecosystem.
Fragmented processes cause potential fallouts and compatibility issues with other applications. Architectural differences between IT systems lead to inconsistent user experience across different touch points. All these issues make onboarding a time-consuming process.
Enterprises lose a competitive edge when they use brute coding for extracting or bringing data to the right place at the right time. This leads to customer chargebacks, runtime exceptions, and vendor scorecard deductions.
Enterprises need to rethink their strategy for lifting heavy data workloads involved in B2B communications. With the right B2B data integration approach, enterprises can automate processes, eliminate manual processes, reduce errors, and get more visibility into their data. This advantage enables enterprises to minimize overheads, improve communication, and securely conduct business transactions.
In my next post, I’ll explain how you can address these issues and setup healthier partner relationships with the help of a modern B2B integration solution.