In this competitive environment whether you are a fortune 100 company like Motorola Solutions, a logistics player like Flash Global or a large insurer like Liberty Mutual, to profitably grow your business you need the ability to interact with multiple trading partners with speed and agility. Irrespective of data formats and transfer protocols you should be able to intake your trading partner’s data and files in their preferred format and transform it rapidly into your format, process that data and integrate it with your backend legacy/ERP systems.

According to Accenture leaders are using B2B digital ecosystems with a purpose, collaborating for customer relevance and focusing on the right outcomes to drive growth.

Building a B2B digital ecosystem that is transparent and end to end interconnected gives you speed, agility and increased profits. Having an interconnected supply chain seems like a simple demand but the data and technology challenges associated with this make it a pie in the sky wish.

Organizations work with a number of trading partners like vendors, suppliers, banks, customers, carriers and other third-party intermediaries. On a daily basis, numerous transactions take place between the trading partners. To automate the transaction processing both the sending and receiving party should have the ability to transact digital content.

Having strong Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capability gives organizations the ability to rapidly scale since you are not held back by your or your trading partners document exchange standard.

Here are the top 10 factors to keep in mind while building a seamless B2B digital ecosystem.

 

1. CLOUD-BASED

A cloud solution gives you all the capability you need but without any of the headache’s related to managing middleware, onsite hardware and software. Significant advantages can be reaped in terms of the ability to innovate rapidly, bring new trading partners, along with the ability to reduce operating costs.

 

2. RAPID PARTNER ONBOARDING

A must-have capability in the B2B digital ecosystem is the ability to on-board new trading partners rapidly and on-demand. You should not have to wait in a queue for 3 months for the on-boarding to be scheduled by your software vendor

 

3. WORLD CLASS SECURITY & AUDIT

The Cloud platform must have SOC certifications in place to ensure that the platform is secure, and customer’s data is treated with confidentiality and integrity.

 

4. SCALABLE SOLUTION WITH NO DOWNTIME

Most robust systems have redundancy and automatic fail over features built-in to ensure that the system is highly reliable and available.

5. INTEGRATE & SUPPORT ALL DATA FORMATS & PROTOCOLS

The B2B digital ecosystem should support all different types of data formats to support. EDIFACT, X12, Rosetta Net, ACORD XML, XML, JSON, Positional files, CSV, XLS etc. Along with that it should give you the capability to accept and decipher all types of transmission protocols including FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, AS1, AS2, Web services using SOAP, and APIs

 

6. VISIBILITY DASHBOARDS INTO THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Dashboards are another must have feature that provides a robust transaction life cycle visibility. Transactions should be able to be queried by dates, sending and receiving partners, document types like purchase order, invoices, and business identifiers like purchase order number, invoice number etc.

 

7. HANDLE LEGACY SYSTEM INTEGRATIONS

The technology solution should offer any-to-any integrations capabilities so that you can take the data and bring it into your legacy and back-end ERP systems.

 

8. FIXED PRICING

Going with a vendor that offers fixed, predictable pricing gives your team an ability to have a predictable budget allocated. The old-school variable Kilo character based pricing leaves you open to ups and downs based on volumes.

 

9. SUPERIOR IMPLEMENTATION & CUSTOMER SERVICE

Look for a Vendor who has expertise in your industry and offers consulting, implementation and customer service support. Having a knowledgeable partner to work with will speed your implementation.

 

10. SINGLE SLA

Today’s modern B2B digital ecosystems require EDI’s, API’s, Responsive User Interface, Business Process Management, Backend Integration, Communication Protocols and more. You might be tempted to bring in the “Best of breed” tools for each of these categories but bringing the different products together will be a time consuming and costly exercise, Using a single platform that has all these modules in a single tool is the best way to save time, money are related integration issues.

mondCloud is here to help you transform your B2B transactions into a Digital Ecosystem. Whether you have specific application or integration need, or have any other question about mondCloud’s offerings, feel free to contact us.


Our technical sales team is ready to discuss your business needs and help you meet them efficiently both now and in the future. Reach out to us at Sales@mondcloud.com

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