With B2B Partner Onboarding, Faster is Better

As the saying goes, there is no need to reinvent the wheel!

But try telling that to early automobile drivers who literally threw off their chains in favor of rubber winter tires. Try telling that to their children who were able to forego owning two complete sets of tires by purchasing just one set for all seasons.

Now consider the ageless topic of onboarding trading partners (i.e., vendors, suppliers, new business channels) into B2B Integration and partner management solutions.  Indeed, measured in technology years, onboarding has been around for a very long time.  Surely, the technology supporting this essential function is about as good as it can get?

Before we answer that, just a quick reminder about onboarding’s critical importance to the business transaction life-cycle.  First, building new relationships with trading partners is dynamic, and not always super-methodical. Sometimes a crisis might develop (need I tell you!), that unexpectedly exhausts the inventory of one supplier and requires one or more new partners to fill the gap.

In such a crisis, faster is better. But so is accuracy and reliability. Onboarding road blocks have never been looked upon kindly by Service-Level- Agreements (SLAs).  Slow onboarding can be the weakest-link in the supply chain, resulting in deferred revenue, slow deliveries, and ultimately SLA non-compliance fines.

So, what if you could quickly fill an inventory gap by creating and accurately define new partner profiles? What if you could assign the correct communication channels, and easily put your finger on the partner’s required business document-types?

 A fresh look at onboarding – in the cloud

SaaS-based B2B Integration has created the opportunity for vendors to reevaluate and innovate around issues that have undermined the ability for quick B2B partner onboarding in the recent past.

In addition to reducing costs and streamlining IT infrastructure, B2B in the cloud has moved toward on-demand scalability. This means the ability to quickly increase capacity to onboard bigger business channels, ones that bring thousands-to-millions more transactions into the partner ecosystem.

Always-on, real-time-information provided though hybrid integration supports onboarding with the best-sourced information to quickly populate partner profiles. And an improved user experience will provide a clear, well organized and intuitive user-friendly interface, making it faster to not only onboard, but also manage transactions across your partner network.