B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Components, Benefits, Challenges and Applications of B2B Integration 39
2.4.6. Internal business process management
B2Bi cannot be achieved through the traditional thinking of the
companies, which treats any integration issue as a technical issue that
can be addressed with technical solutions. This approach ignores the
root cause of the integration challenge — the lack of business process
integration that the technology infrastructure supports. The main objective
of BPM is to make business processes effective, efficient and flexible.
A global 2000 company is typically crippled with redundant business
units, performing redundant processes and using redundant data structures
and systems. For example, they may have up to 12-15 different billing
applications that replicate a majority of the business processes and
about 95% of the billing data. The billing data for each such application
usually resides in a separate database and is not accessible to other
applications. The root cause of these redundancies is bad design of
business processes and the redundant business units that use them.
Integration of all such systems requires major business process
reengineering, which is obviously met with severe resistance from
employees.
2.4.7. Inter-enterprise business process integration
B2Bi requires integration of inter-enterprise business processes. To
achieve this, teams of business-unit and IT professionals from the
trading partners have to get together regularly and redesign core business
processes from a business-to-business integration perspective.
Business process oriented integration happens at multiple levels,
across multiple organizational units and it is an extremely daunting task
to coordinate it. Several complex business processes such as materials
planning and forecasting are not easily integrated among the trading
partners.
2.4.8. Internal resistance
Even if the B2Bi implementation team can guarantee the integration of
legacy systems, heterogeneous cross-organization applications and
business processes, there is no guarantee that B2Bi implementation will