An Expert View of B2B Business Process Integration
Posted by Mike Canniff on February 28, 2011
What is a B2B Business Process?
Closer communications with trading partners (Customers and Suppliers) is a common goal for all enterprises. This is especially true in a Business to Business (B2B) environment. When implementing communications in an online environment, does this become primarily a technical issue or a business challenge?
In this B2B Integration blog series, I will take a look at several business processes and highlight potentially different objectives between IT Departments and Business Units.
The roots of automated B2B processing began with the old EDI standards and transaction processing. Flat file documents were transferred across proprietary networks with arcane data formats. Due to network latency and inability of legacy applications to support real time updates, the business objective of achieving tighter customer communications took a back seat to just making the technology work.
In today’s world of cloud-based and web services-enabled applications, connectivity is faster and easier. Yet there is still a large focus on just connecting applications together. Businesses need to look beyond this application-centric viewpoint to a broader B2B business process approach.
This series will explore the following topics:
- Application Connectivity versus Process Connectivity – Many integration products tout the ability to connect to dozens of different technologies and applications. Yet just making endpoints talk to one another does not complete a business process. In order to complete a business process a variety of tasks need to occur. Tasks include workflows of manual and automated data processing; document approvals; error management; and acknowledgements. Each of these different tasks may end up using different connections between the trading partners involved.
- How quickly do you need a Response? – Real Time versus Asynchronous Communication. Both of these “design patterns” need to be supported. Some integrations require a real time “request and response” model, such as credit card authorization based on web services or price and product availability queries. Other integrations need to publish messages, such as transmitting XML based Purchase Orders to a supplier. In this case, the PO receipt acknowledgement can occur later in the business process.
- Frictionless Data Flow and Process Completion – In other words, Process Automation. Can a business process be automated to the point where it can be completed without manual intervention. This topic will explore what may be required both in the integration software and in the line of business applications (such as ERP).
- How Does the Cloud Enhance or Complicate the Business Process? – Traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) assumed that all end points existed on premise and therefore did not prioritize issues such as security, firewall access, scalability, and reliability. Cloud based integration (or Integration as a Service) increases the options and capabilities and even the risks of B2B integration.
- Focus on Key B2B Business Processes – the last segment will highlight popular business processes that are currently implemented with IaaS technology.
This blog is part of Hubspan’s Expert Blog Series, featuring industry experts and analysts in cloud computing, integration, application architecture, and IT management.
Tags: B2B Business Process, B2B Integration, business process automation, business process management, EDI Integration, Mike Canniff
yes…this is very interesting.Here anyone can get the ideas about the business processes and mostly about the b2b application integration.I know a website namely mexia.com.au , where you can get some more ideas about b2b integration.
Comment by John — March 23, 2011 @ 2:51 am