123-B2B Integration Trends and Challenges

The business environment is changing at a faster and faster pace than ever. How does IT keep pace with the velocity of change and remain Business relevant and continue to deliver top line growth and bottom line productivity? Learn how Cisco IT built an adaptive enterprise driving transformation through business architecture, providing global consistency and scale, local relevancy, with connected unified experience.

This session will provide an overview of the research results and findings of 3 independent research studies conducted by leading industry analysts at Stanford University, Supply Chain Insights and IDC.  Ms. Cohen will discuss key metrics, along with the corresponding analysis of these research studies which focused on global best practices of EDI and XML solutions in the supply chain and the adoption of B2B integration and e-commerce solutions at companies of different sizes, across various industries around the globe.  

All attendees receive a free copy of Rochelle’s book : “EDI Basics”

Jan will present the results of a consultation among EDIFICE members and partners regarding the current and planned use of B2B standards. The findings will trigger interesting discussions and will provide an idea on where the industry is going in terms of Standards usage.

With the growth of cloud services and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), we are in a more and more complex operating environment with a hybrid mix of devices, services and vendors. In this hyper-connected world, managing service inter-dependencies and vendor relationships is becoming a complex challenge. An ecosystem based model enabled by specialized tools can effectively scale to deal with such complexity. This keynote will provide a fascinating insight into the emerging Internet of Things paradigm and its associated challenges. The speaker will showcase an approach to address the vendor complexity in supply chain management, procurement, commerce and other domains. Find out how organizations can embrace IoT through real-time vendor and SLA management across large, complex and ever changing partner ecosystems.

This presentation will provide some insights on the B2B Capabilities and Road Map at Cisco.

As we all learn how to live with “the new style of IT”, B2B integration is becoming more complex, and security in specific, which used to be relatively simple to achieve in the “old style of IT”, is forcing organizations of all sizes to re-evaluate how secure their B2B operations really are, and to consider changes and improvements in response to the dramatic shifts in B2B use.  This presentation will explore some of the external factors affecting security in the B2B context, and provide examples of ways to deal with the challenges.

IT Security is always challenging, but B2B integration and e-commerce is especially difficult, as many security technologies are at odds with a major goal of B2B technology – ease of implementation.  In addition, it is exceedingly difficult to standardize B2B technology across all partners, and many solutions (especially proprietary solutions) that work well internally are challenging to use in B2B.  This session will examine different security challenges, and highlight some approaches to addressing them.

Many Customers and Suppliers are implementing new ERP systems and/or Business Processes, which are intended to “Globalize” a particular business activity.  Everything from Supply Management to Order Management to Cash Management (“Financial Supply Chain Management”).  Freescale will present 6 examples encountered in the past 10 months, identifying and sharing the specific challenges of each.

Sustaining a large-scale catalog solution to meet multiple partner, vendor and 3rd party needs can be challenging. Leveraging tried and true integrated services like XML PIP 2A1 and Bootstrap (flat file) processes, while effective, may not always align with the agility and self-sufficiency required in today’s markets. Enabling ‘on demand’ catalog delivery models, such as lightweight API’s would allow for greater personalization of data to a consumer and better enable scalability for their catalog solutions.

Many countries in the world that have previously prohibited e-invoicing now mandate it. In addition, these emerging economies have overhauled invoicing processes to use information technologies for maximizing tax collection through so-called ‘clearance’ mechanisms. The ‘old world’ for now maintains traditional paper process assumptions for e-invoicing, but growing VAT gaps are putting strain on these ‘ex post’ systems. In this session you will learn more about regulatory developments in the world of e-invoicing with a specific focus on Latin America.