The Benefits of an End-to-End Integration Real-Time Visibility Platform

Say you were driving in the middle of a snowstorm, and all of a sudden your windshield wipers stopped working. What would you do? You’d immediately pull over to the side of the road, because it was too dangerous to continue. Safe move, but it delays your arrival.

Now picture yourself in an enterprise. You receive an order from a customer. But because you’re relying on legacy and outdated integration technologies, you can’t see the essential details about that order from end-to-end. That also is dangerous, because it slows down your business.

If you have limited visibility into the key integration points across your end-to-end business processes like Order-to-Cash or Procure-to-Pay, you are opening yourself up to all sorts of complications. In other words, your B2B integration strategy is broken.

Fortunately, there is a remedy.

Most companies with broken B2B integration are mainly struggling to integrate enterprise workflows with cloud environments without divesting their traditional on-premise systems. Chances are, if you have been nodding your head so far, you are likely troubled by one, some or all of the following:

1. High incident rates

Can you manage exceptions by business priority through technology that allows you to pinpoint partners with high incident rates and identify where risk needs to be mitigated first?

2. High chargebacks/SLA fines that are impacting business relationships

If your company’s EDI technology isn’t reliable or runs on a combination of custom code and manual intervention, it can lead to costly chargebacks and a loss of credibility with your customers and ecosystem partners.

3. Lost orders

Poor integration and a lack of resources can contribute to lost orders, costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in lost revenue every year, depending on your company’s size.

4. Wasting time pinpointing transaction errors

If you don’t have a modern platform that delivers end-to-end integration visibility, your company will remain stuck, unable to reduce the time it takes to connect to customers, identify and eliminate transaction errors, or enable real-time monitoring throughout your ecosystem.

How Do I Increase Visibility?

Up to 89% of companies surveyed believe said that having end-to-end integration visibility is important for their enterprise. That number alone shows you just how valuable it is to have true visibility throughout your business ecosystem, no matter what industry you’re in.

What’s needed is a modern cloud integration technology that features a real-time visibility platform, some of the benefits of which include:

Real-time integration visibility

Role-based dashboards and insights

Context and content around business processes

Ticketing, notifications, and alerts

If your current integration strategy does not support end-to-end integration visibility, you ought to embrace a modern integration platform that can do all these things and more, including transforming EDI documents and putting them into your back-end ERP/WMS/TMS/CRM system to complete its lifecycle B2B transaction. Plus, the capability to do EDI, API, MFT and eCommerce transactions using just one platform will help you leverage integration for the benefit of not just your company, but your entire business ecosystem.

There are other smart moves you can make to fix B2B integration at your company, and we’ll be writing about them in future blogs. But if you want the full story now, download our booklet, ‘Your B2B Integration Strategy is Broken – Here’s What to Do About It’