Partner Must-haves for SaaS-based B2B

Fast on-boarding, scalability, hybrid connectivity – these are the prerequisites for B2B integration and require a trustworthy SaaS partner.

Charlie Greenberg Charlie Greenberg

Fast on-boarding, scalability, hybrid connectivity – these are the prerequisites for B2B integration and require a trustworthy SaaS partner.

What do on-boarding, scalability and hybrid connectivity have to do with B2B? Slow onboarding means a clothing manufacturer undermines the synchronized launch of its own new sportswear line, because its retail channel partners were not fully on-boarded with the supply chain.

A lack of scalability means an electronics distributor could be highly successful in establishing new franchises, but its B2B solution woefully under performs due to lack of capacity. This results in unacceptably slow inventory replenishment. Without hybrid integration your logistics department gets the wrong address for a shipment and completely disrupts the supply chain flow.

This is why your most important vendors, suppliers, channel partners – and competitors – are moving to SaaS-based B2B integration and partner management.  Like you, they’re evaluating the likely capital-costs-savings provided by a fully-hosted, B2B cloud solution.  Like you, they’re attracted to tier-based, pay-as-you-grow pricing.

But, while from a budget perspective this seems to make business sense, your valued trading partners are most concerned with how you treat them. They want to know that your B2B cloud solution will continue to provide a friction-less way of reliably exchanging billing, invoices, purchase orders, Advanced Shipping Notices (ASN) and proof-of-delivery.

You will need to prove to them: 

  • That you can reliably meet service level agreements
  • Your uncompromising commitment to customer-service
  • Your ability to meet their growing requirements

In other words, you must prove you are not just a great partner, but that your SaaS-based B2B Integration technology can support them. So, here are three things you need to have when looking for the best SaaS B2B integration partner:

  1. Fast Partner On-boarding / Partner Self-Service

Accelerating the speed of onboarding has been the lifelong mantra of EDI (electronic data interchange) managers. Cloud B2B is focused on substantially quickening new profile setups, associated documentation requirements and communication preferences for trading partners.

But it shouldn’t stop there.  Given the opportunity, your trading partners will happily welcome the option and convenience of a B2B self-service portal, enabling control of their own onboarding and ongoing profile maintenance. Plus, the self-service portal allows you to conserve EDI resources as updating profiles is increasingly off-loaded.

  1. Quick Scalability

The good news is that the more capacity your B2B Cloud platform requires, the more business you can conduct with channel partners and customers. But inadequate scalability, or scaling slowly, can undermine SLA compliance, customer satisfaction and your timely ability to support growth.

A fully hosted cloud platform enables you to quickly support a surge in B2B transactions, quickly expand trading partners and increase accessibility to additional industry standards.

  1. Hybrid Integration

Companies deploying B2B applications that are tied to a limited integration strategy, often lack timely connectivity to crucial business data, whether in the cloud, or on premises.  Without real-time data accessibility, any number of B2B and partner management functions can be slowed to the point of undermining customer service functions and ultimately incurring SLA, non-compliance. fines. For lack of necessary data input, shipping orders, purchase orders and logistics tracking might all be delayed.

A comprehensive hybrid integration strategy empowers B2B partner management to coexist with all essential strategies and business tools, whether in the cloud or on premises.

We invite you to try Software AG’s B2B cloud solution for yourself. Register for a free trial of webMethods.io B2B by clicking below.