Connectivity options: New portal slashes EDI/B2B onboarding costs; simplifies trading partner enablement

Industry estimates indicate that manual trading partner enablement by a hub company’s IT staff takes 10 to 15 days and costs around $15,000 to $20,000 per partner. Seeburger says its new RollOut Portal simplifies the process and reduces the cost via self-service onboarding and certification.

By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff March 23, 2009

RollOut Portal—an online tool offered by Seeburger that facilitates self-serve onboarding and recertification of customers and suppliers to EDI/B2B systems operated by automakers, CPG companies, and other organizations—can be used with any B2B gateway. The portal virtually eliminates the cost, time, and effort required to connect new trading partners to the central hub, migrate existing partners to a new system, change partner configurations, and launch new roll-out campaigns.

According to industry estimates, manual trading partner enablement by a hub company’s IT staff takes 10 to 15 days and costs around $15,000 to $20,000 per partner. According to Seeburger, its RollOut Portal reduces the time frame to a few days and removes the company running the EDI/B2B system from the partner testing process entirely by automating all functions and providing step-by-step online instructions.

Customers and suppliers can self-test both the data structure of a given EDI/B2B message and the communications protocol being used to transmit the message—including AS2 and OFTP— simply by uploading the test message and pressing‘Start Test.’ This allows partners to control the testing schedule and avoid IT bottlenecks on the sponsoring company’s side. Test results are delivered immediately with reports that pinpoint the cause of any testing failures.

If the hub company is using the Seeburger Business Integration Server (BIS) or other Seeburger solutions for EDI/B2B communications, a new Seeburger-exclusive Move2Production capability automatically puts successful RollOut Portal-tested messages into production without the time, expense and error risk of rekeying all information.

Companies that use Seeburger BIS or adapters also have access to connectivity options for trading partners of any size and technology infrastructure. Seeburger offers solutions for automating transaction document exchange via traditional EDI, a Hub & Spoke system that supports AS2-based point-to-point integration for partners that are too small or unwilling to be EDI-enabled, and a variety of Web-based options for smaller partners that still do business on paper.