B2B Integration: How to quickly onboard a burger

WebMethods.io B2B will offer sustenance to companies hungry for a low-cost, powerful, yet simplified partner automation solution.

Charlie Greenberg Charlie Greenberg

Picture an imaginary (but likely) Fortune 500, fast-food organization with over 500 locations and franchises in North America. 

Consider that HQ (i.e. the franchisor), insists that all locations and franchises collectively use over 2,000 suppliers in order to maintain the consistency (flavor, texture, packaging etc.), of their highly celebrated and popular fast-food offering.

Imagine that in the course of regularly updating their menu, as well as reevaluating their supplier relationships, the franchisor may need to onboard 10 or more new suppliers in a given week.

What’s more, each franchise or location is responsible for transmitting its own ingredient supply orders, while swiftly responding to supplier invoices and logistically managing its own deliveries. In return, HQ will quickly bring online new suppliers just-in-time for the latest and greatest fast-food promotion whose TV commercial has just interrupted your Sponge Bob rerun on Nickelodeon.

But even in a Fortune 500 company, an old and diffuse B2B integration and partner management strategy can wreak accelerating degrees of havoc:

Cautionary tales:

  • Franchise #1: An expired security certificate, erroneous document mapping or just poor usability results in this franchise failing to receive an Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN), thereby being unprepared to accept delivery of fresh ingredients for customer consumption. The shipment is returned to the supplier and the franchise goes without delivery until the next business day, compelling the culinary staff to use stale or out-of-date ingredients.
  • Franchise #2: The franchise lacks real-time connectivity to HQ’s back-end systems and is unable to collect the necessary information to pay invoices as contractually dictated by Service-Level-Agreements (SLA), resulting in late-fees and compliance fines.
  • HQ: Marketing launches cross-franchise advertising for the new soy-based “Yum-yums,” replete with special promotional toys given with every purchase! Unfortunately, the primary soybean supplier has yet to be officially onboarded in the partner management system, meaning the suppliers for the soy-based ingredients are still unavailable. This forces the local franchises to give the promotional toys away with its usual food-fare (don’t want to disappoint the kiddies).

This somewhat contrived (though reality based), series of use cases can be imaginatively, (but negatively) drawn out to further include FDA violations, fast-food brand deprecation and a general softening of the company’s bottom-line.

Menu Option: webMethods.io B2B

 With the release of webMethods.io B2B, companies hungry for a low-cost, powerful, yet simplified partner automation solution, should feed on the following information:

  • Software AG’s, fully-hosted SaaS-based tool enables centralized control and monitoring for all partner activates, communications and transactions.
  • Use our webMethods.io B2B solution to ensure accurate message mapping and system to-system transformation, coupled with an industry-leading integration platform, providing secure and unfettered access to all relevant business systems across your enterprise.
  • Add-in user clarity and accessibility through a simplified and logical business interface and accelerating the speed of B2B operations will be a natural outcome.

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Bon appetit.