Perceptant

Forrester Consulting today announced the results of a new multi-client study that focuses on enterprise electronic data interchange (EDI) and business-to-business (B2B) document exchange operations. The findings highlight that enterprises are still using multiple integration solutions, and still face the same challenges those multiple islands of integration create. Nearly 80 percent of respondents indicated they plan to upgrade their B2B systems within the next year, demonstrating that it’s time for a change toward a more strategic approach to B2B integration.

The survey questioned 300 senior IT managers from North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific regions on their EDI/B2B use.

Respondents identified the following factors as extremely important drivers for improving how they work with their trading partners: the need to reduce costs (51 percent) and to exchange electronic documents with business partners (40 percent), and the need for real-time visibility into business processes (43 percent). Companies are challenged to achieve these improvements because of the manual processes still in use with these partners. For example:

– Approximately two thirds of respondents were exchanging EDI/B2B
documents with 60 percent or less of their trading community

– Roughly 42 percent of respondents are still exchanging spreadsheets
and other text documents with 40 to 100 percent of their trading
community.

The survey found at least 64 percent of respondents had more than 500 trading partners with whom they need to regularly exchange EDI/B2B documents, demonstrating that the average number of trading partners is increasing. With this trend, overcoming the technical difficulties companies are having with their existing EDI/B2B can provide opportunities for operational efficiencies and cost savings. Respondents indicated solving the following difficulties were important or extremely important:

– Integrating with other applications (66 percent)

– Responding to new business requests (63 percent)

– Managing partner communities (59 percent)

– Supporting smaller, non-EDI capable partners (58 percent)

– Effectively supporting process improvement efforts (58 percent)

By taking a holistic approach to their integration capabilities, respondents indicated it was important or extremely important to gain benefits in these areas:

– Ability to leverage existing integration investments (78 percent)

– Better control over file transfers (78 percent)

– Easier to support process improvement efforts (75 percent)

– Easier linking of external partners to ERP systems (71 percent)

Perceptant provide next generation Supply Chain Management, B2B e-commerce and EDI solutions that drive the integration, synchronisation and collaboration of global supply chains. For more information, visit http://www.perceptant.com

Tags: B2B software, business process integration, eai, EDI, EDIFACT, perceptant, supply chain integration, Supply Chain Management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 3:22 pm and is filed under B2B e-commerce, EDI, Supply Chain Software, supply chain management software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.