If you are having trouble reading this e-mail, please CLICK HERE
|
THE B2B (business to business) space is riddled with great – and failed – expectations.
For too long, businesses have focused on what they would like rather than evaluating what they can have. And in the cut-throat environment of sales at all costs, suppliers have tended to sell the customer what they want – and hoped that technology would advance sufficiently in the meantime to enable them to deliver.
That’s the origin of B2B hype. It’s given B2B a bad name, increased scepticism and retarded its ubiquitous adoption.
There is growing realisation that there is a gap between what is needed and wanted – and what is possible. Take integration as an example. In the past, the main focus of integration in the B2B space was internal: ensuring divergent back-end systems could ‘speak to’ each other.
Today, internal enterprise application integration (EAI) is regarded as a ‘given’. The challenge now is to enable the integration of these internal applications to external marketplaces (B2B Integration).
Miraculum’s skills in the e-marketplace and integration arena have been widely acknowledged – to the extent that a major UK organisation recently contracted us to handle the integration of two marketplaces with which they have to deal daily.
We succeeded because of our basic philosophy that integration between any two systems – from legacy to state-of-the-art - can be achieved.
After all, what is a legacy system? Because technology is moving so quickly, every organisation is faced with having to accommodate legacy products. Any application that is deployed to production is by default a legacy system.
And that’s good news for companies which have ‘old’ technology: if it’s not broken, it probably won’t have to be replaced to accommodate integration with other systems.
That’s not to say integration is easy. Integration is the most complex part of any B2B deployment because it has to make two business processes work together when they were neither designed nor intended to work together. They have to be made to appear as if they are one and the same.
With sufficient skill and effort, any B2B solution can be made to seem as if they’re part of what’s already there. With sufficient resources, integration between enterprise systems and diverse e-marketplaces can be achieved.
B2B integration can be as simple as sharing business object data (“head-to-head integration”) or as complex as executing remote business objects (“close-coupled integration”).
Head-to-head integration simply allows for two systems to ‘talk’ to each other: your e-procurement system can read an order generated by my e-procurement system.
Close coupled integration, however, adds real business value to the process. For example, if a buyer places an order with an offshore supplier, there is every chance that the price will change depending on factors such as exchange rates. If the buyer’s and seller’s procurement systems are close coupled, the seller’s system could evaluate what is being bought and provide a forex forward cover quote, valid for a prescribed period.
But close coupled integration demands a commitment to continuity from both partners to accommodate upgrades to systems. It’s not a once-off exercise. Rather, it demands an ongoing commitment from both parties to ensure that real value continues to be delivered.
Close coupled integration is what companies say they want. It’s what companies say they need. And it can be delivered – without hype or empty promises.
Miraculum is proud to be the technology partner for the 3M RFQ.
I am
thoroughly impressed with the Miraculum support services. All queries have
been handled with the utmost importance and sensitivity and Miraculum have
been extremely quick to respond. The friendly service and attitude has made
using the system a pleasure. Liesl Steyn Group Financial Manager DDSA
|
|
|
