Trading Partner Management

Changes that are driven by new requirements such as new data formats and communication protocols, new business exchanges, and a broad range of partners that vary in size, type, and sophistication, require your organization to be flexible and adapt to changing and varied situations quickly and efficiently.

In order to be competitive, you must be responsive to the constant changes occurring within your trading partner community.

Sterling B2B Integrator:

  • Works over almost any communication protocol, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP, SOAP, EDIINT (AS1, AS2, and AS3). Therefore, you have the flexibility to respond to changes in communication methods (async and bisync communications are supported through IBM® Sterling Connect:Enterprise® interoperability)

  • Provides scalability to meet fluctuations in transaction volume

  • Enables end-to-end order visibility for tracking transactions throughout the lifecycle of an order and ensuring that orders are never lost

  • Provides mailbox store-and-forward services

  • Interfaces with B2B exchanges, marketplaces, and services such as RosettaNet, Sterling Information Broker®, and the GSX and IBM networks

You can also use it to facilitate e-business with your trading partners for a vast assortment of transactions, including EDI, e-mail, and reliable bulk file management. You can build human intervention points, such as approvals, into your processes and set up self-service access to information across trading partner systems. You can also:
  • Reduce or eliminate the requirement to re-enter key data
  • Speed up order reconciliation through automation
  • Reduce the cost of integrating trading partners

The following figure illustrates the path that the data takes from your applications to your trading partner community. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) components and B2B services facilitate the transfer of information, while the processing engine, the Business Process Engine, manages everything.