Last week at the GXS Integration Customer Forum, we were fortunate to spend time with customers and share stories on B2B integration, hear what’s working today and get feedback on GXS roadmaps. This was our 7th year and it was great to see attendees making the trek from Paris, London, Japan, Brazil and Belgium as well as from across the States.
The threads below surfaced from the hours of conversations during the two-day event in Washington DC, which included more than 20 presentations, hundreds of 1:1 discussions over drinks and demos (including the iPad app sneak-peek), and an enormous pile of Maryland Crabs ;-]
Are these themes also happening in your group? What’s your perspective? Leave a comment below and tell your story.
Takeaway #1: Speed, Speed, Speed.
Today, B2B integration teams are being tasked to move faster, driven by a blend of M&A activity, business-led SaaS deployments, and a “lean” economy with already-low staff levels (output-per-employee is at a 10-year high). At the Forum, we heard a number of stories about the need for B2B integration programs to put their running shoes, connecting the dots between speed-to-onboarding and speed-to-revenue.
- As Under Armour’s sales rocketed at a blazing 33% growth rate, purchase orders volume exploded as well, rising from 377M to 540M over 2009-2011 (is this orders or sales?). To support growth, UA’s B2B integration program had to move fast to maintain a global presence, a reliable platform, and provide strong support. UA’s B2B program goes with the same “Big Bets with Big Partners” mantra as the rest of the organization, in order to support the company’s four pillars: great product, great story, great team, great service.
- BMO Harris Bank recently tasked their “B2Bank” group with two fast-track programs. First, they needed to quickly setup connections with 16K corporate banking customers after digesting an acquisition that doubled their size, while maintaining their reputation for award-winning service and 182 years of dividends. Next, BMO had to quickly respond to the global RSA security attack and protect customers by quickly rolling out replacement RSA tokens to 25K corporate banking customers.
- This “need for speed” was also echoed in this year’s InformationWeek 500, which led with a theme of “high-octane businesses.” (side note: GXS was ranked #3 among IT vendors in the IW500, based on some speed-related projects of our own).
What it means: B2B integration execs should build “elastic” capabilities into their programs to quickly react to business demands, with the ability to scale up (and down) communities and connections — not just at a technology level (eg., cloud-based integration), but also across teams, processes and geographies.
Takeaway #2: B2B Completes ERP.
Many customer keynotes touched on the challenges of rolling out SAP projects and how B2B integration programs are uniquely suited to extend ERP platform programs and investments. The notion of “ERP firewalls” was a common thread, due to the data quality challenges in multienterprise environments (eg., retailers make 4.4 updates per purchase order, on average).
- Dr Pepper Snapple’s SAP consolidation journey began in 2008, to integrate their Packaged Beverage business onto single SAP platform. The company realized that expanding their B2B integration capabilities were needed to ensure the journey’s success.
- Rexel, a global distributor of electrical supplies, was also facing an ERP consolidation program from a series of M&A activity. Given the “think global, act local” nature of the electrical supply market and managing 2,200 branches in 36 countries, the 12B euro company placed B2B integration on its list of top five IT initiatives.
- Benchmark Brands (Footsmart.com) wanted to improve the quality of inbound supplier data before it hit their ERP systems. By reaching out through their multienterprise connections to uncover the root causes of compliance errors and work with suppliers to fix the underlying issues, Benchmark saw a 21% drop in supplier chargebacks and 91% reduction in packaging/labeling issues.
What it means: B2B integration execs should look to their multienterprise platform as a enabler of ERP success, by speeding up ERP change management across communities and filtering inbound/outbound data to back office systems.
Takeaway #3: Big B2B Data Fuels Service Excellence
We heard a number of stories of “sell side” groups leveraging their multienterprise data and activity streams to improve customer service.
- Dell’s Global Support Services leverages an enormous amount of real-time data to deliver on its promise of delivering an excellent customer experience. The company is ranked #1 in onsite response time and closely tracks their NetPromoter score. As part of Global Support Services, Dell handles roughly 24K daily field dispatch requests for onsite support, choreographing B2B transactions across authorized service providers (DASP), parts/logistics providers and customers to nail their same-day service level agreements. Dell’s Command Center, which was modeled after other real-time service examples (NASA, emergency rooms, 911 calls, nuclear plants) keeps a keen eye on service levels. For example, Dell’s Command Center sifts through their B2B transactions in real-time, turning dashboards to “red” if there is no response from a service provider within three minutes of a sent transaction.
What it means: B2B integration execs can contribute to overall sell-side (and buy-side) service excellence by extending B2B activity streams and lightweight SaaS apps to the business.
REXEL's Claudio Borlo
Mars' Thierry Felt
