As businesses today operate in competitive environments, business-to-business integration (B2Bi) has become crucial for survival.
That's according to Jan Lewis, managing director of IT services provider iEnter, who says B2Bi allows businesses to act in concert to boost not only their individual performance, but that of the broader value chain.
"By electronically connecting your business with that of suppliers, partners and customers, and exchanging a variety of information, every company in the resultant chain enjoys the ability to improve planning, synchronise activities and reduce the time taken to source and process goods and services," Lewis points out.
Far from a new concept, he notes, B2Bi has been used in various forms since the late 1960s. However, he says while it was once the preserve of those organisations able to afford it, the introduction of standards has led to the development of software solutions which enable rapid deployment of B2Bi for more companies than ever before.
He points out organisations previously wrote the integration in-house and had to manually link each system with undefined standards. This created complexity and an administration nightmare, he says.
B2Bi is now being driven by emergence of the Internet and related concepts such as open standards XML (eXtensible Markup Language), Web services, service-oriented architecture and software-as-a-service (SAAS), says Lewis.
He believes businesses get the agility they need by investing in such technologies. "Agility in the sense of change without having to reinvest in new standards; lower staff utilisation by using automated tools with a 'set-up once and use many' concept. Standards change every year and by using open-standard tools as mentioned, the business doesn't have to recreate the integration from scratch with each new business opportunity."
Lewis explains B2Bi first requires an explicit agreement for co-operation between the companies seeking to integrate their systems.
"This is closely followed by a process of understanding what systems are in place in each company seeking to integrate with any others. This will, to an extent, determine what technology is selected to achieve the integration; and, depending on the systems in place, the configuration of the integration is also determined."
Lewis says successful B2Bi depends on planning, strategy, the right tools and expertise. "The B2Bi solution should evolve with the company, with the industry and with the IT industry. It should offer comprehensive functionality, with the flexibility to support third-party software vendors while connecting existing and new systems in a common framework. It should also scale to accommodate customer and trading partner systems."
B2Bi solutions, he says, can be delivered as on-site deployments, as hosted SAAS implementations (avoiding any expenditure on software licences or hardware), or as a hybrid deployment combining aspects of on-premises and hosted solutions.
In the short term, Lewis says, companies should focus on how integration can reduce operational costs, increase worker productivity, automate supply chains and improve customer relationships.
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