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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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.

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.

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.

See how all the steps you need to take come together, with tools and advice to help with each task on your list.

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Structure the project

Determine the B2B strategy goals, objectives, and scope, and identify the project participants and assign roles.
- Storyboard: Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy
- B2B Integration Project Charter Template
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.
Identify solutions

Determine the gaps between current and future maturity, and review and assess solution alternatives for people, processes, technology, and data.
Create the strategic roadmap

Select and prioritize B2B integration initiatives.
- B2B Integration Strategy and Roadmap Template
- B2B Integration TCO Calculator
Make the business case

Effectively sell the value of a B2B integration strategy to obtain approval to proceed with implementation.
- Make the Business Case for B2B Integration Presentation
Implement the B2B integration strategy

Learn how to communicate initiatives with stakeholders that will be affected by change.
- B2B Integration Communication Planning Template

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.

Activities:		Outputs:
1.1	Determine business impact of B2B integration	Understanding of business impacts
1.2	Define drivers for improving B2B integration	List of improvement drivers
1.3	Identify B2B integration pain points	List of pain points
1.4	Define project charter inputs	Completion of Project Charter
1.5	Identify stakeholders	Identification of stakeholders
1.6	Identify stakeholder communication style	Identification of stakeholder communication styles

Activities:		Outputs:
2.1	Update Trading Partner Inventory Tool	List of trading partners, their data types, protocols, and trading standards
2.2	Create partner context diagram	List of trading partner requirements
2.3	Tailor interview guide	Ready-to-use stakeholder interview guide
2.4	Conduct a mock stakeholder interview	List of stakeholder goals
2.5	Map business goals to strategic objectives	List of strategic objectives
2.6	Identify desired maturity state	Desired maturity state
2.7	Identify immediate integration opportunities	Identified integration opportunities

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.

Fit-for-purpose strategic roadmap containing prioritized initiatives to reach target maturity state.

Activities:		Outputs:
3.1	Identify your current B2B maturity	Current B2B maturity
3.2	Conduct a gap analysis	Gap analysis
3.3	Facilitate discussion around alternative solutions	Recognition of solution alternatives
3.4	Determine total cost of ownership	TCO calculation
3.5	Create initiatives	Strategic roadmap

Define best methods and practices for communicating initiatives and changes with stakeholders.
Establish metrics.

Activities:		Outputs:
4.1	Determine business value of B2B integration	Make the business case
4.2	Learn to communicate initiatives	Communication plan
4.3	Establish metrics	Implementation metrics
4.4	Determine the governance structure of your strategy	Governance strategy