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Efficient onboarding and management of partners, suppliers and customers with IBM Partner Engagement Manager (PEM)


Johannesburg, 22 Sep 2020

The global and digital nature of business has intensified, especially this year with companies forced to work remotely due to COVID-19. In spite of eased lockdown restrictions, several companies already adopted new operation methods to maximise productivity, taking into account that the length of uncertain circumstances are unknown. Organisations therefore face even more pressure to move towards a more digitised, centralised and unified infrastructure for their business ecosystems.

IBM Partner Engagement Manager is a software as a service (SaaS) based engagement system, which can be deployed on cloud or on-premises, either through a SaaS subscription or as a software licence. It enables faster onboarding, collaboration, interaction, monitoring, management and visibility into the activity flows between companies and their partners, customers and suppliers. This solution significantly reduces the time and resources required to onboard new partners while enhancing the ability to manage and maintain existing partners.

Customer feedback on this efficient solution is evident of its support in effective time management for an organisation. Greg Russell, Offering Manager in IBM Sterling, explains: “Feedback that we received from customers about their processes prior to IBM Partner Engagement Manager is that they had to set aside 60 to 90 days to contact partners to validate that their contact information is still up to date. With IBM Partner Engagement Manager, they don’t have to spend additional time trying to figure out who the right contacts are. In addition to be able to just onboard partners, we also have a support that we call Continual Touch, which provides contact recertification. This allows the organisation to create an activity that sends a note to partners with their current contact information to verify if it is still up to date.”

Furthermore to ensure optimal usage of an organisation’s time, another key function provided by IBM Partner Engagement Manager is self-service. Partners, who can be suppliers or customers, are empowered to provide their own information directly into the B2B system – and can be automatically notified whenever their input is required. Business users can customise alerts and reminders to let partners know when they’re about to miss a deadline.

IBM Partner Engagement Manager monitoring capabilities ensure that partners fulfil all the necessary requirements for doing business with the sponsor organisation. It provides self-service onboarding and partner management, helping to compress the “quote to cash” cycle time. By standardising and automating processes, IBM Partner Engagement Manager helps to limit costly manual errors and increase efficiency, by enabling partners to maintain their own records.

A centralised point of control to manage and monitor onboarding as well as ongoing interactions with the B2B community is provided by IBM Partner Engagement Manager. This solution is configurable and extensible, enabling each business to design and direct the interaction experience for their partners, suppliers and customers. Through simple drag-and-drop functionality, business users can create new processes and activities, easily customising and defining the tasks and approval steps required in a given process.

The architecture of IBM Partner Engagement Manager includes a portal, repository and provisioner that uses a workflow and REST APIs to collect, store and provision to solutions like IBM Sterling File Gateway, automating actions previously left to the IT teams. An added benefit of IBM Partner Engagement Manager is that it works with other solutions and partners, with APIs and workflows flexible enough to integrate with other RESTful APIs.

For detailed information on this IBM Partner Engagement Manager (PEM), visit: https://trustlinkmft.com/ibm-partner-engagement-manager-pem/

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Trustlink enables the secure and reliable exchange of information, including payment instructions, corporate and customer information and operational data.

By building long-term professional relationships with our customers, we develop an understanding of their environment, challenges and requirements in order to assist them to meet their demands. The nature of our products and solutions means they make up critical components of our customers' business practices and infrastructure, firmly entrenching us as a value-added service provider.

Trustlink solutions enable your organisation to:

  • Automate and secure all file transfers.
  • Proactively monitor the exchange of information with partners.
  • Standardise and consolidate various file transfer solutions.
  • Have end-to-end visibility on information flows.
  • Better meet service level agreements.
  • Improve auditability of information flow.
  • Improve security of the file transfer environment.
  • Apply high availability to those partners where risk is highest.
  • Manage all end points from a central base.

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Editorial contacts

Igmar Rautenbach
Head B2B Solutions
(+27) 082 444 8500
igmarrautenbach@trustlink.co.za