Key themes in B2B integration
The seventh GXS Integration customer forum took place on the 11th and 12th October at the Gaylord convention centre in Washington DC. The event lets customers spend time talking to GXS personnel and for both sides to get an understanding of what’s important in B2B integration.
This year 3 key themes surfaced.
Speed
B2B integration teams are now being tasked to move faster, driven by a mixture of merger and acquisitions, business-led SaaS deployments, and a “lean” economy with already-low staff levels. The Forum highlighted a number of stories about the need for B2B integration programs to produce results and revenue in the quickest possible time.
B2B completes ERP
Many customer stories were concerned with the challenges of rolling out SAP projects and how B2B integration programs are uniquely suited to extend ERP platform programs and investments. The notion of “ERP firewalls” was a common thread, due to the data quality challenges in multi-enterprise environments.
Big B2B data fuels service excellence
There were a number of customer stories concerned with “sell side” groups leveraging their multi-enterprise data and activity streams to improve customer service.
This means that professionals working on B2B projects can contribute to overall sell-side (and buy-side) service excellence by extending B2B activity streams and lightweight SaaS apps to the business.
Commenting on the event, Bobby Patrick, Chief marketing officer at GXS said, “It was fantastic to see the breadth of B2B integration this year. As integration moves to the cloud, our customers are expanding beyond tradition B2B e-commerce scenarios and rolling out integration for financial services, field dispatch and SaaS integration.”
