Modern business integration has to do more than simply make disparate systems work together. It’s about coordinating data and technology in order to create more efficient processes which serve your business’s goals and requirements. It’s about leveraging the best of your digital assets, and providing your business with an advantage in competition.
In many small to mid-sized and enterprise-level businesses, IT systems are a jumble of task-specific software applications that do not communicate with each other. This is especially relevant when businesses adopt solutions such as accounting software, supply chain management and inventory tracking software that all manage their own distinct set of tasks. This will eventually result in lots of duplicate data in multiple systems that are no longer able to communicate with one another.
This is why companies must use business integration technologies and tools to ensure that data exchanges with trading partners are reliable and secure. These tools and solutions must support a wide range of protocols for communication as well as the formats required by different trading partners.
The most effective business-to-business (B2B) integration solutions enable businesses to simplify EDI and application data flows from different systems onto one platform that has transparency and governance features that can help reduce costs. Businesses can gain competitive advantage by enhancing the transparency and quality of data in their supply chain across trading partners. This is why business integration isn’t only about enabling B2B other communications, it’s about delivering a complete trading partner enablement experience that provides quantifiable results oriented to the bottom line.
