Say you were going to the gym on your old bike and all of a sudden it breaks down. What would you do? You’d immediately get down and see what’s wrong with it. Obvious move, but it delays your arrival.
Now picture yourself in an organization. You get communication of collaboration from a customer. In other words, you receive an order from a customer. But since you’re relying on your ‘old’ legacy systems and outdated integration technologies, you fail to evaluate details of the order from end-to-end. That demands a lot of time, as it slows down your business and disturbs your ability to deliver value.
When companies have limited visibility into the primary integration points across various end-to-end business processes including procure-to-pay or order-to-cash, they find it extremely difficult to optimize cash flow, prevent losses or delays, and ultimately increase productivity. In order words, they are compelled to open themselves up to all sorts of complications. Or in other words, their B2B integration strategy is completely broken. The good news is there is a powerful remedy.
A lot of companies that have a fragmented B2B integration are primarily struggling to integrate transactions and workflows with cloud environments and harness the true potential of customer data. In case you agree with this, chances are you are likely troubled by some of the following bottlenecks:
· High chargebacks/SLA fines
If companies EDI technology isn’t trustworthy and runs on a specific combination of complex custom coding and EDI mapping, it can trigger costly chargebacks and a loss of credibility in their customers and ecosystem partners.
· High incident rates
Companies that rely on old EDI systems find it hard to manage exceptions which, in turn, impacts their ability to pinpoint partners with high incident rates and identify where risk needs to be handled first.
· Forfeited orders
When the data of customers is not comprehended properly, it can lead to delays or worse lost orders. This can cost millions of dollars, inhibiting revenue generation and ultimately value.
· Recurrent transaction errors
If companies do not have access to a modern integration platform that facilitates end-to-end visibility, they will remain stuck, increasing the time needed to connect with customers, identifying and eliminating transaction errors and facilitating real-time monitoring across ecosystems.
If you face any of the above-mentioned situations, then it’s likely that you need to switch to a solution that provides end-to-end visibility into your data-driven processes and transactions. And that’s where you need a powerful B2B integration platform.
How to Increase Visibility?
End-to-end integration visibility is important for a business. That’s true, no matter what industry whether retail or manufacturing. And to have that, companies need a modern self-service integration technology that enables business users gain real-time visibility over processes.
Leveraging these platforms can help companies savor benefits such as:
- Better insights through dashboards and application connectors
- Better access to customer data, exactly at the pace they want
- Make them easier to do business with
If your current integration strategy does not support end-to-end integration visibility, you must employ a self-service-powered platform that can help you deliver those benefits and more including transforming EDI documents and placing them into your back-end system for B2B transaction completion. What’s best is that all this can be done by business users themselves. No longer companies need their IT teams to execute these processes, and this frees them to focus on more important tasks. Ultimately, organizations can easily drive forward on their path to innovation and growth.