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Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy
Strong partnerships require seamless integration; don’t let lagging integration capabilities undermine your B2B relationships.
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Contributors
- Informatica
- Corix Group
- KS Plastics
- Interswitch
- IntegrationWorks
Your Challenge
- The business is placing an increasing amount of pressure on IT to accommodate additional trading partners and data exchanges.
- Despite the recognized importance of enhancing business-to-business (B2B) integration capabilities, many organizations struggle to define a strategy that will meet business and IT needs while providing a cost-effective solution.
- IT often finds itself in a challenging situation uncertain of best methods and practices for leveraging people, process, technology, and data.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- There have been drastic changes to B2B reference architecture. There are new applications and cloud-based services that have emerged to simplify B2B integration. It may prove to be less expensive and strategic to take advantage of a B2B managed service provider rather than attempting to enhance your on-premise B2B capabilities.
- Businesses need to reposition themselves, and their B2B strategy, to take advantage of the emerging API economy.
Impact and Result
- Create a comprehensive strategy to allow your organization to reduce costs while increasing profits through seamless integration and real-time transactions.
- Enhance efficiency by having clear, end-to-end visibility of your processes and with your trading partners.
- Align IT with business needs from the beginning of the project to create and deliver a B2B integration strategy that is capable of scaling with business growth.
- A fit-for-purpose strategic roadmap will assist in seamless integration with key trading partners.
- Leverage best practices for trading partner management to achieve enhanced trading partner relationships.
1. Structure the project
Determine the B2B strategy goals, objectives, and scope, and identify the project participants and assign roles.
2. Gather the requirements
Derive B2B requirements from business goals and objectives, specific data exchange standards of trading partners, as well as people, process, technology, and data components of the future state.
3. Identify solutions
Determine the gaps between current and future maturity, and review and assess solution alternatives for people, processes, technology, and data.
4. Create the strategic roadmap
Select and prioritize B2B integration initiatives.
5. Make the business case
Effectively sell the value of a B2B integration strategy to obtain approval to proceed with implementation.
6. Implement the B2B integration strategy
Learn how to communicate initiatives with stakeholders that will be affected by change.
Guided Implementations
This guided implementation is a five call advisory process.
Call #1 - Structure the project
Establish the rationale for building a B2B integration strategy and structure the project: validate scope, stakeholders, assumptions, and constraints, and set metrics to measure success.
Call #2 - Requirements gathering
Discuss the business goals and mapping them to IT objectives. Review partner survey results and look for opportunities for more integration with partners. Review the results of the trading partner protocol inventory and help segregate partners. Review the results of your B2B integration maturity assessment.
Call #3 - Solution identification
Review results of the current state maturity assessment, and interpret gaps between current and target states. Review solution alternatives available to fill gaps. Discuss insource, outsource, and hybrid implementation alternatives.
Call #4 - Solution selection and roadmap development
Review results of the TCO calculator and implementation alternative selection. Assist with definition of implementation and migration initiatives to move from current to target state.
Call #5 - Review business case and implementation plan
Review the business case and provide insight into selling the case to senior management. Assist with plans for securing resources, communicating initiatives, and implementing the strategy.
Book Your Workshop
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Project Rationale and Structure
The Purpose
- Understanding why the project is important.
- Alignment of business drivers with issues and pain points.
- Identification of project goals, scope, risks, participants, and metrics.
- Identification of stakeholders.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Set the context of a B2B integration strategy within your organization.
- Gain approval to move ahead with the project.
Activities
Outputs
Determine business impact of B2B integration
- Understanding of business impacts
Define drivers for improving B2B integration
- List of improvement drivers
Identify B2B integration pain points
- List of pain points
Define project charter inputs
- Completion of Project Charter
Identify stakeholders
- Identification of stakeholders
Identify stakeholder communication style
- Identification of stakeholder communication styles
Module 2: Gather B2B Integration Requirements
The Purpose
- Understand your partners and how they integrate.
- Define B2B integration objectives that align with business goals.
- Identify the characteristics of our target maturity state.
- Uncover patterns in B2B requirements.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Ability to recognize immediate opportunities for improvement.
Activities
Outputs
Update Trading Partner Inventory Tool
- List of trading partners, their data types, protocols, and trading standards
Create partner context diagram
- List of trading partner requirements
Tailor interview guide
- Ready-to-use stakeholder interview guide
Conduct a mock stakeholder interview
- List of stakeholder goals
Map business goals to strategic objectives
- List of strategic objectives
Identify desired maturity state
- Desired maturity state
Identify immediate integration opportunities
- Identified integration opportunities
Module 3: Identify B2B Solution Alternatives
The Purpose
- Identification of your current state and the gaps to fill in order to reach your desired target state.
- A thorough understanding of all solution options and deployment alternatives available.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Fit-for-purpose strategic roadmap containing prioritized initiatives to reach target maturity state.
Activities
Outputs
Identify your current B2B maturity
- Current B2B maturity
Conduct a gap analysis
- Gap analysis
Facilitate discussion around alternative solutions
- Recognition of solution alternatives
Determine total cost of ownership
- TCO calculation
Create initiatives
- Strategic roadmap
Module 4: Make the Business Case
The Purpose
- Show the business value generated from a B2B integration strategy.
- Develop a communications plan.
- Decide how to measure the strategy to determine success.
- Determine authority and who can make changes to the B2B strategy.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Define best methods and practices for communicating initiatives and changes with stakeholders.
- Establish metrics.
Activities
Outputs
Determine business value of B2B integration
- Make the business case
Learn to communicate initiatives
- Communication plan
Establish metrics
- Implementation metrics
Determine the governance structure of your strategy
- Governance strategy
