EDI to B2B : A sea change in perception
For many of you reading this, the term B2B may be synonymous with the term EDI. And this was not entirely wrong a few years back. But let us just say, things have evolved since. As for the others, you can safely skip the next paragraph and read on.
EDI was, at one point, one of the most popular and widely used methods for enabling in B2B transactions and it still is. But B2B as a term encompasses a much wider array of themes today, that enable Businesses to collaborate with each other in a more efficient, cost effective and innovative manner. And this very significant change in perception of B2B is what this article will talk about.
For a very long time, B2B and EDI teams were viewed as purely technical teams that translated business documents to a digital form that was understood by other trading partners. It was not an area the Management would be interested in dabbling their heads in, so long as everything was running fine. Mind you, EDI has always been and always will be critical to businesses, as it typically has a direct impact on their toplines.
However, over the last few years we have seen technologies and products in the Integration and Business Process Management space finding an increasing common ground with products from the B2B space. And this extension of these B2B product suites into the Integration and BPM space and vice versa though understandable, given the similarity of their core function i.e. data transformation in both these areas, has opened up a wide array of possibilities.
Visionaries in this space have shifted their focus over the years from atomic messages to integrating entire business processes, bringing about a paradigm shift in the approach to both Integration and B2B. This shift from being responsible to the final atomic message to being responsible for the business process or the sequence of steps that achieve a business goal either entirely within the organization or across organizational borders with trading partners, has been responsible for this huge change in perception we have seen of Integration and B2B.
Standards have evolved in parallel keeping pace with this shift in focus, moving from simple message based standards like ANSI X12, EDIFACT etc to business process based standards like ebXML, Rosettanet, BPML, WSFL, XLANG etc, in the process establishing the ‘Business Process’ as the basic unit of measure.
So where has all this led us?
“EDI - Oh that Techie stuff!!” – Alas! It is not a phrase that will be heard very often anymore. The focus on Business processes has necessitated the active involvement of business personnel outside of the core IT team. This has resulted in an increased dialogue and visibility across both the business and IT teams, resulting in better informed decisions, that take both business and technology perspectives into view. This active interaction also inherently ensures identification of issues/bottlenecks that may have otherwise not have been noticed or given the right priority.
Other benefits we have come to see include monitoring/alerting, visibility and collaboration. We will not dwelve into the details of each of these here, as we would need a separate post to do justice to each of them.
However, it is important to touch upon the impact of these changes to the B2B world. With the new ability to provide visibility to Business Processes, businesses now have the choice of extending this facility to their trading partners. This will greatly improve visibility across organizations leading to better planning, forecasting, fewer and more efficient exchanges and a higher level of collaboration.
Initiatives such as CPFR- Continuous Planning Forecasting and Replenishment and VMI have taken collaboration to a whole new level, where the manufacturer makes ordering decisions on behalf of the retailer on the basis of shared information received from the retailer.
These going forward will be extended to the smallest of trading partners enabling them to do business in a much better and smarter manner with their larger counterparts.
