With the expanding reach of digital technologies catering to businesses, partners and customers, B2B integration has emerged out as one very important way of running the business. For any business owner thinking about scaling up his business, adopting a B2B integration solution should always be the primary goal. A Business-to-Business model brings the customers and partners closer to the business owner, hence a mutual relationship between the business and the users is established. With the current trends, we can evidently see how people are more reliant and comfortable with personal relations.
B2B integration can be defined as the amalgamation, transfer, automation and optimization of critical business processes which are specifically used to connect a business organization with all of its trading partners in one centralized place. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the most widely used and easily accepted way of going around B2B integration. However, modern B2B integration works with a set of features that cater to the different requirements. This article will talk about some of the key features that a B2B integration solution should offer.
Features of a B2B Integration Solution:
- Support for B2B standards
The most important feature that any B2B integration solution must have is the ability to support the widest range of B2B standards. B2B standard documents are methods set out as to how data should be formatted with specific document types while working for B2B integration. If the solution supports the introduction of various B2B standards, a user can easily develop their custom B2B flavor to fulfill their business requirements. - Application integration – SME and Enterprises
Multiple application integration is one of the core components to look for in a B2B integration solution. It is imperative that a B2B solution should be able to integrate various business applications, taking their adapters to import and export data. Businesses all over the world are using applications such as SAP, Salesforce, NetSuite, etc. and the ability to connect all these applications together under the same roof shall help to automate the business processes of any organization. - Transport protocols
Any B2B integration solution should have the ability to transfer data or files in any format requested. FTP and AS2 are two protocols that are involved in B2B integration. Simply put, the more transport protocols a solution supports, the more it can help an organization in managing and moving their data across various channels. - Mapping and Translation
Another important feature often demanded in any B2B integration solution is the translation server. An integration solution catering to the B2B model must be able to convert documents from one format to another. For example, a set of data in an X12 format shall be automatically translated into XML format if the business requires so. - Analytics and insights
A B2B solution should always tend to offer clear insight and analytics to any business owner. This provides coherent visibility of critical business data across the entire platform. Modern B2B integration solutions are adopting AI-based analytics capabilities which are giving them more power in their own hands – the decision-making process is highly influenced by the actionable insights these B2B integration solutions offer. Not just the supply chain management, but also the entire product development and techno-functional aspects of B2B integration can gain a competitive edge with a robust analytics dashboard to back them up.
Going by the trend, it can be seen that more and more B2B businesses are going to emerge and shall change the way integration is done. What needs to be understood clearly is that these large businesses have a massive amount of data and business information to handle. It is anticipated that these B2B integration solutions shall introduce many more features to cater to businesses worldwide.
