The 4 Companies That Mastered Partner Onboarding

When it comes to partner onboarding, your enterprise cannot afford to take days or even weeks – yes, weeks -- to bring a new trading partner up to speed. It is critical that the members of your digital ecosystem be able to get up and running quickly and efficiently.

Companies that have not yet embarked on a digital transformation plan are not taking advantage of modernized technology that streamlines trading partner onboarding to allow business to transact faster. Whether you’re a transportation logistics company or a wholesale food distributor, partner onboarding doesn’t have to be a burden.

Here are four companies who have learned to master partner onboarding through ecosystem integration technology. They all have many different needs and goals, but the one common factor for all of them is Cleo Integration Cloud.

Hogan Transportation & Logistics

Hogan Transportation & Logistics has been around since 1918, with its headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri. Hogan delivers high-quality transportation services within the U.S., such as truckload, logistics, and fleet maintenance. Eventually, Hogan found a centralized way to manage the different trading partners within its ecosystem.

“Customers tell us, we’ve never had connections set up this fast before,” said Glenn Jansen, director of IT at Hogan. With Hogan’s transportation logistics business rapidly growing and new partners coming onboard every day, the power to clone mapping templates for faster onboarding goes a long way with Hogan’s clients.

Lipari Foods

Lipari Foods is a wholesale food distributor from Warren, Michigan that serves more than 5,000 retailers in 12 states. The company was having difficulty onboarding a new trading partner with data requirements that went beyond simply EDI. Because Lipari could not communicate via its partner’s preferred file type, the process became quite expensive and arduous, and worst of all, much more prone to error. Through Cleo, Lipari has been able to simplify the onboarding process and can bring a new trading partner onboard within hours rather than days.

“At the end of the day, we want to be easy to do business with ... Cleo helps us accomplish that goal by allowing us to better communicate with both customers and partners. You can’t put a price on that,” said Michael Hegarty, director of ERP and CRM corporate strategy at Lipari Foods.

Steel Technologies

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Steel Technologies Inc. produces steel for customers in many industries ranging from automotive, appliance and construction to name a few. Steel is responsible for up to 2,000 EDI documents a day, but its PC-based EDI system lacked adequate monitoring capabilities as well as substantial customization.

“Every time we wanted to implement a new FTP connection, we had to modify the program to get it working,” said Mike Hoben, senior software engineer at Steel. “It was taking two months to onboard a new trading partner because there was so much code to change. It was extremely difficult to manage, and we had no visibility into dropped communications.”

Cleo has given Steel a way to set up its trading partners much quicker than before while also leveraging a secure, stable platform that is able to scale as needed.

Master Your Partner Onboarding

Organizations must be able to handle any type of requirement their digital ecosystem throws their way. When businesses can easily add, remove, and alter a piece of data related to a customer or a partner configuration, they are enhancing their agility as well as their responsiveness. 

Optimizing operational agility is paramount to gain a better handle over your digital ecosystem. Once you have the right technology in place, you can consolidate legacy and disparate systems, and automate the onboarding processes and integrations that drive your ecosystem. 

A centralized integration platform can provide faster partner onboarding for EDI and non-EDI workflows, as well as the connectors that integrate any type of application without additional coding. With the right technology, you can have your trading partners set up for data movement within minutes, and EDI and XML data transformation only takes a few hours or less once you’ve completed the initial mapping. 

Cleo Integration Cloud allows enterprises to automate onboarding tools and data transformation because it comes pre-loaded with B2B connectors that give you a repository of hundreds of preconfigured, ready-to-deploy communication templates so you can connect faster. With versatile APIs and application connectors, organizations can accelerate the delivery of integration with your most critical business, and end-to-end visibility ensures you stay compliant with your customers’ SLAs. 

Your customers shouldn’t have to wait, so why should you? Download “How to Rapidly Onboard Ecosystem Partners and Applications” today to discover how integration technology enables businesses to support any data requirement and eliminates the trading partner onboarding and IT application onboarding complexities that slow business growth.

Download the Whitepaper