The purpose of business-to-business (B2B) integration is to coordinate external partner interactions with internal business activities. Integrating with customers, suppliers, service providers, and even remote locations or subsidiaries is important for every company, to a greater or lesser degree. As the number and complexity of partner interfaces and internal application and data resources increases, the need for an effective B2B integration strategy – and the difficulty of coping without an effective strategy – increase dramatically.

Signs of ineffective B2B integration:

• You can't integrate fast enough or efficiently enough
• Takes too long to connect with new partners and customers
• You can't quickly support new business documents
• Customer levy penalties and charge-backs due to non-compliance
• Manual and duplicate entry of transaction data, handling exceptions - increasing staff costs
• Staff is exhausted from new partner initiatives
• Manual methods of synchronizing application systems
• You're having trouble managing
• Inventory levels are unknown or frequently too high
• You can't determine status of projects, goods in transit, products in manufacturing, etc.
• Errors are being made in fulfillment
• Lack of timely, high-quality data about business operations
• Unable to make critical business decisions because data is missing
• Your profits are being affected
• You're running out of stock
• Forecasting is inaccurate
• Customer satisfaction is low, affecting your ability to generate new revenue
• Product returns are at unacceptable or unsustainable levels
• High DSO (days sales outstanding) and poor cash flow due to delays in order processing, invoicing, and settlement


Business drivers: Multiple factors might drive a company to take action to solve one or more of the problems listed above, but the most common ones include:

• A significant new revenue opportunity that requires capabilities that cannot be easily provided using existing IT assets
• Loss of a significant sales opportunity due to a lack of critical capabilities or capacities
• A new business document or connectivity requirement from an important customer or supplier
• Participation in an industry consortium initiative that requires new connectivity and application or data integration capabilities
• Changes in supply strategy that require frequent and rapid integration of new supply partners
• Replacement or significant upgrading of an ERP or other major application system, requiring reconnection or reengineering of partner interfaces and related business processes
• An important business intelligence initiative, requiring new or more timely access to critical business data
• A merger or acquisition, requiring coordinated co-existence and ultimate migration of one or more IT systems
• Business analyses or projections that reveal a need to replace business processes that are sources of error, delay, or frequent repair



IT drivers: In addition to the business factors listed above, changes in a company’s IT strategy and environment can over-stress legacy B2B integration mechanisms that were designed to support IT systems from an earlier era:

• A shift in application strategy from internal application development to configuration and customization of commercial application software products
• Platform or programming language changes that make maintenance of legacy partner interfaces difficult and expensive
• Partner demands for new or non-standard business document exchange (XML, spreadsheets, complex flat files)
• Requirements for on-demand access and near-real time transaction response that require replacement or supplementation of legacy batch processing
• Compressed implementation timeframes that cannot be met using programmed implementation and legacy implementation technologies



The complexity challenge: Mid-sized companies and even business units within larger enterprises must deal with IT environments that are as complex in kind, if not in scope, as those found in much larger enterprises:

• Tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of trading partners
• Tens or hundreds of trading partner document types, connection types, and protocols
• A complex, overlapping array of commercial and internally developed application systems
• Multiple, distributed database and file systems, managing many thousands of company-level tables and files
• Multiple hardware and software platforms, accumulated or inherited, over time
• Hundreds or thousands of unique business processes that link partner connections, applications, and data resources within and across business functions and departments



But midsized companies face a conundrum: How can they take on the B2B integration challenges of a larger company with leaner IT budgets and resources, and in most cases, less control over implementation requirements and timeframes?

The answer is EXTOL. We offer a very broad range of both B2B integration and application and data integration solutions, with an affordable and highly flexible range of products and services, designed to meet the needs of companies with limited implementation time, budgets, resources, and skills.