Seeburger, the specialist in application integration for business-to-business commerce, today announced an update of its B2B Portal, which combines a streamlined portal structure for supplier collaboration with three software modules for managing electronic data interchange (EDI) and supply chain events.
Seeburger offers technology that facilitates relationships between buyers and suppliers, working as a liaison between outside supply chain partners and a company's own enterprise applications, such as supply chain management software, ERP, and CRM.
The cornerstone of Seeburger's offerings is the B2B Gateway, which enables trading processes, such as document exchange, supply chain visibility, business process management, and data reconciliation. At the heart of those capabilities — and of the B2B Gateway itself — is the company's Business Integration Server (BIS) software, which provides the background translations and conversions that allow for seamless interaction among trading partners scattered worldwide.
Today's B2B Portal release extends the capabilities of the flagship Gateway technology. Seeburger has created a portal framework that provides a single interface for all of the access points across a supply network. Business users at a manufacturing company, as well as its suppliers and outsource service providers, can log in through the same Web interface. The ensuing information display is tailored to each partner's role.
Three technologies serve as the core applications of the B2B Portal: BIS Roll Out Services, BIS Partner Self-Service, and BIS Insight. The Insight module is an enhanced version of existing software; the other two modules make their debuts in this release. All aim to create a simpler way of interacting with the B2B transactions managed in the underlying Gateway system.
"The Portal gives a view into what was traditionally a much more technical area of the B2B Gateway," said Scott Lewin, CEO of Seeburger North America, in an interview with Managing Automation. "Typically, it was only accessed by the technical B2B team, the EDI guys, but now you can log on through a Web portal ... and you can see the statuses of all of your own transactions, your own data, and figure out where in the process that transaction is."
The new Roll Out Services utility helps manufacturers quickly activate EDI for new suppliers — within 15 days, compared with an industry average of 37 days, according to Seeburger. To accomplish that, Roll Out Services features easy access to pre-defined instructions on how to activate EDI.
The Partner Self-Service module delivers change management capabilities to manufacturers and their connected trading partners. "The idea is to dramatically reduce the human intervention that's needed," Lewin explained. For example, a supplier could submit an updated FTP address through the Portal, and an alert would automatically go to the B2B administrator at the buyer company. The administrator could then accept the change with a single click.
Supply chain visibility is the specialty of the updated Insight module, which includes functions such as document searching and inventory monitoring throughout the supply chain, allowing manufacturers to better adjust stock levels based on demand.
"The B2B Portal is the direct result of customers' asking for better visibility of the data, better views into the business process, and ways to cut costs of rolling out business partners," Lewin said.
The applications that make up the B2B Portal can be purchased and deployed separately or in combination. Lewin declined to discuss pricing, saying it will vary widely based on the size of the implementation. The suite is available now.
At the dawn of this decade, some industry observers would have said that a company like Seeburger was living on borrowed time. The adoption of the Internet and data exchange formats such as XML were expected to sound the death knell for costly connectivity technologies like EDI. Instead, EDI has adapted and maintained its prominence. New forms, such as Web-based EDI, have emerged, promising lower costs, if not the ironclad security of a dedicated virtual private, or value-added, network.
Lewin said that in recent years, even the security concerns have ebbed, as protocols such as AS1 and AS2 — which Wal-Mart mandates — have become battle-tested. In fact, Seeburger North America has flourished, growing revenue more than 100% in each of the past four years, Lewin said.
"Companies have a lot of money invested, and a lot of years invested, in setting up B2B EDI programs," he said.
He acknowledged a role for XML, RosettaNet, and other protocols. "But the reality is a lot of the very large companies have been doing EDI and it works, and there's no compelling reason to change."
Seeburger boasts partnerships with the major ERP vendors, including IFS, Oracle, and SAP, whose enterprise customers can use Seeburger products with the assurance that those products will mesh with their ERP systems.