The Critical Role B2b integration is playing in today’s business world

In today's highly competitive global market, manufacturers have to complete composite, virtual supply chains, or "webs", that address the rising need for build-to-order products.

The best performing enterprises are mitigating this challenge by cost effectively applying B2B integration or b2b e-commerce policies and tools to thrive, survive and produce. B2b integration increases interactions among business partners by rationalizing data flows, and shortening both the product design and development process and the manufacturing and order cycle. This are just some of the processes that b2b integration approaches is really helping businesses operate efficiently. B2B? integration can be achieved through horizontal and vertical data flows. Horizontal integration links business partners across a supply chain. Vertical integration provides data flows through a company. But a multi-directional integration composed of both data flows is the most critical attribute in business to business success.

The best way to apply b2b integration is through the internet. It is cheap and nearly every organization that is considering b2b integration is already connected online. In fact, the real power of internet services is due to the fact that it can readily facilitate both horizontal and vertical exchange of data between applications. Even typical EDI integration vendors are adjusting their products to support internet services. Many thanks to the extensibility of internet services, Industry specific XML expressions are changing, which many experts believe will finally exchange today's two EDI standards, X12 and EDIFACT.

Most enterprises now agree that internet services offers them the best solution to all their b2b integration needs, though, over the past few years, internet services have not swapped EDI for two very specific grounds. EDI has grown to encounter the differing needs and EDI is chiefly an organized document of business data. For the swapping of business content such as a purchase order, packaging the data in XML was overloaded. Instead of creating a business advantage, it just reduced the amount of bandwidth required to move documents.