Page 3 - Logistics News June 2018

Thought Leadership

Business transformed:

Integrating B2B

By Ann Grackin, courtesy ChainLink Research

In today’s complex supply chains,
business leadership has to provide
the guidance on where the business
is going, what partners, what
processes and what results need to
be achieved. Thus, the business has
to understand the technology and
the benefi ts that can be derived from
B2B communication and forge an
effective partnership with their own
internal IT team.

TODAY, COMPANIES need an
information strategy to keep up with
the ever-expanding marketplace’s
demands for information. Having
separate stovepipes for supply chain
tasks or electronic data interchange
(EDI) transactions provides little
Figure 1: Today’s integration challenges – content, media information leverage to optimise and
across protocols, formats, data sources from the cloud as well execute the many cross-functional
as enterprise on-premise systems behind fi rewalls. and cross-enterprise activities that
must fuse. This is why we see more
ecosystems of partners moving to
shared cloud platforms that can
leverage information.
Into this world of complex end
points, with its increasing requirements
to communicate, enter more and more
forms of data and technology that we
must absorb, analyse and respond to
(Figure 1).
Of course, all this is only
academically interesting if it leads to
unifying business processes. There
are many stand-alone technology
companies who provide one or some
of the above capabilities. However,
today, to unify partners, companies
cannot restrict themselves to one
process such as procurement or one
data stream. So, the smarter move is to
provide the ability to leverage multiple
processes, methods and data streams
on one platform throughout the
Table 1: B2B communications end-to-end relationship. Information

2 June 2018 | Logistics News