- 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.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Allegis
Guided Implementation
8/10
N/A
47
Trinidad / Benham Corporation
Guided Implementation
8/10
$14,259
5
Armstrong Flooring Solutions
Guided Implementation
9/10
N/A
N/A
Onsite Workshop: Develop a Comprehensive Business-to-Business Integration Strategy
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