SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

My organization is on the retail side, so it has been more beneficial on the insurance side of the business because it has allowed them the freedom to do a few more things. It helped them connect to private eyewear doctors so they could upload their insurance forms. Previously, we had to babysit our old software at the end of the month to make sure that files wouldn't get blown up because of their size. Whereas, SEEBURGER BIS doesn't seem to have an issue with this, which saves us time.

The solution helps us automate processes, more on the insurance side. Where they used to have to babysit monthly files, because of size, they don't have to do that with SEEBURGER BIS. They just run the monthly process. Files get collected, translated, and sent to the proper systems, so the babysitting is gone.

It helps keep us up-to-date on regulatory requirements.

I like that you can search documents.

This solution is a little more straightforward versus my old mapper, IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. I can point, click, and link one data field to another, then it will map. With my old mapper, I had to save the data, then read all the records of the table or file before processing the conversion. So, I had to read the data pile, score all the data, and then convert. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I can just take the data and map it to a field, which is more straightforward and robust.

Data mapping is faster in SEEBURGER BIS than IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. It is easier to use the tools in SEEBURGER BIS to debug maps than it is in Sterling B2B Integrator, which has its glitches. For example, I have a special character in the data field. Data will fail when mapping this special character with Sterling, then I have to go in and fix it. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I don't have this issue.

I find it simple to do my mapping. Today, I have that it is pretty simple to set up trading partners.

The West Coast was thinking that SEEBURGER BIS would convert my maps, then they would own the process. The problem: There are times that we have to change dates or something in the map to facilitate what the business is looking to do for a partner. So, it turned out after much bellyaching on my part that this couldn't be done. So, I don't know if we can have a cloud solution and still own the maps. I think they are going towards that direction. We are looking to possibly have them host the server, but then the fees will go up.

I have been using it for slightly over a year. I had some informal/formal training on SEEBURGER BIS.

Our team in California has been using it for three to four years. 

I don't think since I have been involved with SEEBURGER BIS that it has been down. We do have a backup. So, if one server goes down, then it kicks over.

On the technical side, there are five or six users.

We have plans to increase usage of SEEBURGER BIS in the future. The retail side of the business is open to utilizing the solution more. Also, as the insurance business grows, they will definitely be using it.

The technical support is excellent. I reach out to the service desk in Germany and normally get a reply within a day. They are able to get to the root cause of an issue and resolve it. 

I have a consultant in Phoenix, Arizona, who is assigned to our account, and it's usually within the day I get an answer from them.

Right now, we use IBM Sterling B2B Integrator as our EDI platform and are converting over to SEEBURGER BIS. The California team has probably done 85 percent of their conversions. So, they are pretty much up and running. At this point, I have converted roughly 95 of my maps over to SEEBURGER BIS, but none are in production. COVID-19 took a big hit on us, which kind of slowed us down.

We were also using Connect Enterprise, which is another IBM product. Connect Enterprise had reached the end of its life and IBM was no longer supporting it. In addition, it seemed like Connect Enterprise didn't have the capability to handle the file sizes that the insurance side of the business was pushing through.

We switched to SEEBURGER BIS because we want an all-in-one solution for multiple products.

The initial setup was straightforward. A person whom I work with, and is not very technical, found the setup complex, as there are a lot of steps. I put down the steps for her, and she was like, "Oh yeah, this is pretty easy". You just got to follow the guidelines.

I have converted 95 maps. I probably have another 100 to 200 more to go. I use the mapping tool every day. 

We had someone from SEEBURGER come out and show us the mapper in November and February. 

SEEBURGER came in to install it. There were probably three or four people involved from the SEEBURGER side along with two people from our California team.

Today, the California team is going to show me how to install a new AS2 certificate.

This is less babysitting. In the amount of downtime, we are probably saving money, which is a big thing.

They need to be more competitively priced. When it comes to training, they need to lower their prices. It shouldn't be so specific. Maybe they should outsource training to another company. From what I can see, their training is pretty expensive, and they don't do anything for free. I don't expect it for free. However, if I have a quick question, and it takes five minutes to answer then don't charge me 30 minutes. Instead, let it go until you have 15 minutes worth of questions from me before you charge me the 30 minutes.

It is a bit expensive. When I was looking at the product 12 years ago, they were talking about $500,000 for the product. 

When they decided not to move forward with anything to replace IBM Connect Enterprise, I looked for solutions that would benefit our eyewear side of the business. We wanted to go with the version of SEEBURGER BIS that runs on SAP PO, but we were overruled. The organization purchased SEEBURGER BIS and wanted us to use that version too.

I have always liked the product. I looked at the SEEBURGER BIS product almost 12 years ago. However, because of the price, it was shot down.

Understand the cost factor. Have someone from SEEBURGER help you, though this will add to your costs. 

It is fairly simple to pick up as you start using it. Definitely have SEEBURGER train you, if you are not already familiar with the product.

The mapping is easy, but it still takes time to learn.

Because of COVID-19 and the impact on the businesses worldwide, some monies from our budget have been cut. However, I think we are looking to go to 6.7 either the first or second quarter of next year. On the insurance side, with 6.7, they can do a few more things a bit easier because of some of the APIs that can be incorporated. I also think that the footprint of the software is smaller. Less storage is less money that we need to spend on storage. We are also looking at the possibility of having the solution stored on a cloud. We haven't gotten that deep into discussions yet.

Sitting around with SEEBURGER at a seminar in December and discussing their project plan for the future, I think this product is the way to go.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I will probably go up further with my rating as I learn more of its capabilities.

It is primarily an EDI translator for us. We have over 1,000 trading relationships running through it, totaling a couple of million documents. We don't just have EDI flowing through the platform. We have XML documents from some partners, and other things flowing inbound and outbound. But the bulk of it is EDI.

Our deployment is on-premise. We went that way because we knew the cost of doing it the other ways was more expensive. And in general, that is the model that we use.

The benefit of using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), one that we like to tout right now, is the interaction of the solution's front end with the CMA module that we purchased from them. We're able to create surveys around testing processes and the automation of the actual testing. Using that survey, it will link to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end so that partners can actually do testing on their own. They get feedback and data testing, based upon our actual requirements around EDI documents. It works 24/7.

The reason we tout this so much is that we had a backlog of 100-plus partners. It was taking an average of 66 days to get a partner up, from start to finish, through all the documents that we require. This solution has reduced it down to an average of six days, with zero backlog. That's a significant improvement.

We were having to do a lot of it manually before and this is one of the big things that we hype. It's a combination of both suites: the CMA component with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end. That's by far the biggest benefit that we can name.

We use some of their other tools, like the Imart web platform, for some of our smaller vendors. That has been helpful in reducing the cost on their side from having to do EDI.

But the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end, in and of itself - having that EDI translator straight out-of-the-box - and being able to move stuff away from IT development into the actual business side, has been helpful.

Also, with the alerting and everything else that we get out of it, we're a lot more efficient. We're able to focus more on problems with our partners, versus reacting to systemic issues. We don't see a lot of systemic problems through the platform, so we're able to respond to our partners in a quicker fashion.

Among the most valuable features are the EDI translator and a lot of the components which enable creating compliance sets. Having something standard, out-of-the-box, and being able to use that has been a huge benefit for us. We came from a system, in the past, where we were having to manually create all that on our own, and it was very time-consuming and costly. Being able to do that out-of-the-box has been great.

Another aspect that we employed in the last year-and-a-half has been their CMA platform component, which hooks to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end. We've been able to set up an automatic testing process for our partners. They can walk through and test all their documents, in the sequence that our company would be expecting to pass and exchange them, without any interaction with someone in our company.

They made improvements to the email error alerts that go out, for the EDI technical. Those typically go straight out to the partners. Those messages are significantly clearer and easy to read. The same messages in the front end are not nearly as clear. It's supposed to be the same error, but the message that goes out for EDI is really easy for anybody to read and understand, but you have to be really solution-savvy to understand the message in the system itself.

That is the component that we definitely have the biggest issue with. Unless we want to go search for an email, trying to read the actual message in the platform is tough.

Also, some of the functionality for retriggering documents, where you have to step through a termination process and then retrigger it, versus just being able to restart or retrigger more easily, is a bit challenging, depending on the scenario.

Three to five years.

We had some incidents during the first year but it seems to have become more stable every year, as we've learned something, or figured out something. During this last year-and-a-half we've had almost zero incidents.

We have no problems with its scalability. We did a performance test where we did about eight times our volume through it in a single hour, for an entire heavy week, and it handled it. We've had no issues with it. Everything we've added to it - multiple documents inside the implementation, different components to it - we've had no issues. It's handled it all.

If I just look at the consultant we have who is dedicated to our company, he's awesome; great.

There are some challenges with the Premium Support. I don't know if it's because they're based in Germany. I know our infrastructure at times has been posing the wrong information questions. But it's been challenging at times, and other times it's been great. Part of the problem is that they always want the logs and those aren't always available. But for the most part, support has been good. For what I've had to use them for, their response times have been fairly good; within expectations.

We had an older version of webMethods, which was not an EDI translator. Comparing SEEBURGER BIS vs webMethods, the latter was just a communications broker. We knew we needed to switch for a long time. We got to the point where we could no longer upgrade that platform or do anything else because of the heavy customization and programming that had been done to it.

Because it was something brand new for us it was challenging, but I would expect that with most programs. Where we struggled the most was with some of the training that we got from the SEEBURGER team. Until we had a more sit-down discussion with them, we were a bit challenged, especially on the business side. That had more to do with the trainers than it did the actual platform itself.

We started the deployment in June of 2015 and finished up putting in the last document in October of 2015. Our deployment went really fast, surprisingly. We actually had projected it to be 18 months, and it took us significantly less, once we got rolling.

In terms of an implementation strategy, once we got through all that, it was getting in the servers. We had a lot of EIP stuff (Enterprise Information Protection) they had to work through. Then we started out by moving over specific documents, based on business processes and then communication protocols.

I can't remember on the IT side how much of our staff was involved in the implementation but we had the Business Operational Unit involved. The operational team had six full-time employees and two development groups. We also had two change-management people and two IT people who directed. They were the IT people we were worked with directly in bringing up the business part of the process. There were other IT focused on the hardware and internet connection changes. We also had one full-time, dedicated SEEBURGER consultant here with us on-site.

For maintenance on a day-to-day basis, the way our EDI operations are set up today, there are four full-time employees and one manager. They work on SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and everything we have flowing through it, as well as all the partners. In addition, we have two development people but they don't use it on a daily basis.

We did it directly with SEEBURGER.

With all the new processes and stuff that we've added, one of the big benefits we've seen is that we've never had to increase headcount. We've been able to accommodate everything. Because of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) our development, and ourselves on the business side, have been able to stand up new documents, new processes, new flows, with a reduced headcount. It's enabled business to handle more of it, as opposed to being an IT function.

There was a big list, including the IBM solution. There were six other platforms but it was three-and-a-half years ago.

Both our US and Canadian operations evaluated the same companies then, and SEEBURGER was chosen in Canada. When we did the evaluation again, here in the US, we ended up with pretty much the same results. The fact that Canada was using it helped make the decision to go with it.

My advice would be to make sure you have a good, strong change-management group which can assist and help along the way. If you're not coming from something like we did, it can be a struggle getting people to adapt and change. It's not so much the system, it's the people that'll be utilizing it. It also helps if you have a strong SEEBURGER consultant there who makes sure that your IT people fully understand what's expected and where they're going with it.

We don't use the Landscape Manager at this time but it is something we're looking at.

In terms of the Active-Active feature, that's part of IT while I'm on the business side. I know it's being utilized. We have had very few issues with the load volume passing through it. It handles it well. Sometimes we see a few spikes, but they don't last and they don't cause any system issues.

When it comes to adding integrations, the way we're utilizing it, a lot of it seems to be pretty fluid. We haven't had a ton of issues. We use middleware. We don't allow direct-connect to any other platforms, at least on the US-side of our operations. We have various file formats that we have to convert the documents into, and putting them through message queues, or through the NAS Exchange, has been pretty easy. If we have issues, it seems to be on the other side of the ball, where they didn't set up their interaction or integration correctly.

We increase the usage every year. To give you an idea, 99 percent of all our purchase orders through our vendor partners run through the platform. The one percent are new partners who are still working at getting their EDI up. For the purpose of trading most documents with us, the bulk of it goes through this platform, whether it's invoicing, shipping notices, purchase orders, changes, etc.

We're looking at what they're offering for the 6.7 upgrade. We're definitely strongly interested in the new Message Tracking upgrade. Landscape Designer is being looked at for our infrastructure group, for being able to handle upgrades and service pack upgrades. And there is the potential move, eventually, to go to 6.7.

I would give the platform itself an eight out of ten. As I said, I have a problem with the error messages that are in the system.

We primarily use it for standard EDI practice forecasts, firms, ASNs, invoices, etc. We use everything here, including VDA, EDIFACT, and ANSI, but we are also now having our customers send us drawing files, and then we're sending them off to our engineers.

Our business has grown to have 14 major customers, which implies orders of greater than 200 parts per customer. If we include ship-to then we're probably talking closer to 50 new customers that have moved to EDI. I don't think we would have made it through the pandemic, to be honest, without this.

I have a tiny team in Spain that was entering every one of those requirements manually until we switched over to SEEBURGER, and then we could get them added pretty quickly. Now, for the first time in our history, we are adding Asian customers. Branches in India and China are starting to get EDI started, which has never happened before.

BIS provides me with everything in a unified platform and I haven't needed to add any third-party solutions. 

This product helps us to automate processes. Previously, we would have normally manually entered requirements and now, we just let it read them in automatically. As an example, just one customer with a 200 part requirement that goes out over 12 months would normally have taken my team two hours per week, just to enter the requirements. Now, it just happens and there is no work required at all from the team. In this regard, it has absolutely helped us to increase efficiency. 

At this point, automation hasn't led us to reduce the number of employees that we have. As such, I don't think that we've decreased any of our costs. 

SEEBURGER has helped us to enable digital business transformation. Every time we add a new customer, there is a digital footprint. This is no longer a manual process.

The fact that BIS is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment is very important because it means that we could take from one to the other. That is amazing.

The product somewhat helps to future-proof our business. I can add new adapters, for example. We're strictly on EDI and I know that they have more offerings than that, but we have not moved past it yet. Certainly, they are not stopping with EDI, which is good.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to make changes on-premises, without having to contact SEEBURGER. It allowed me to work on my timeframes, which is important because if I didn't hear back from a customer then it wasn't wasting SEEBURGER's time. I'm able to work more independently. 

The cost models have room for improvement. There are different licensing models between Europe and the USA, which is something that I don't understand. This is an aspect that needs to be improved.

Java is very old technology and they should move away from it, to anything that's better.

We have been using SEEBURGER since July 1st, 2017, four years ago.

With our on-premises implementation, we never had any issues with uptime or stability.

Scalability-wise, I don't know of any limits for us, so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

At this point, we only have two users, although we need to enlarge that role. I am responsible for the customer setup, connection setup, and map design. My other colleague also does customer setup and communication setup, but no map design.

We plan on expanding our usage because we're going to start moving our Asian colleagues. As soon as we find a customer that's able to do EDI with them, we will turn it on. We're certainly increasing in that world.

We now approach every customer and look for EDI opportunities. Now that we've determined that we can handle receiving CAD-type drawings through it, we are going to send that to different plants. We certainly plan on using it more, and I know due to COVID, we've never experienced the number of customers asking us for EDIs as we are now.

With respect to support, it's best-of-breed for me. I still get to work with my American counterparts at SEEBURGER, but my contract is in Europe. When I do need true support, I tend to get most of it from America, so that works in my time zone. Alternatively, when I use the service desk, it's support from the European side.

I like working with the SEEBURGER support. The service desk itself now has a chat, and that has saved me days because they answer the question right when I was on the phone with them, or on chat. That's been amazing. The service desk is always helpful. I'd say 95% of the time, I only have to use the service desk, which is included in our maintenance.

With my support in America, I have one particular person that the emails go to. Unless it's a big issue, he usually has an answer back out to me that day, so costing me far less than if it had to go to other areas. It's been a dream.

Everywhere in the world used something different before SEEBURGER.

In our American offices, we used TrustedLink, whereas, in Canada, we used Atos. In Europe, they used other packages. In Spain, for example, they used their own desktop version for EDI integration. We have also used SAP PI and others.

I don't know why we switched to the current solutions but it was done in conjunction with our SAP rollout.

In this IT world, it would be classified as quite straightforward.

In America in 2017, we started with a cloud-based deployment. Since then, we have migrated everything to an on-premises server in Europe. At the time, we went with a single point of communication, so we were only using OFTP2 when we started. It was a single server install. 

When it comes to our mappings, we've gotten very complex, especially because we merged the two. It is relevant to note that we have a two-stage implementation. At first, when it was just for Germany, I don't know that it was classified as very complex. When it was just for the USA, it was not classified as very complex. But when you blended the two, we added a lot more complexity to our world. Every process is broken down as "Is this a US EDI or is this European EDI?"

Effectively, we doubled our complexity at that point.

I don't know the original German timeframe but for the US implementation, it took a little more than two months to deploy.

For our first implementation, we asked SEEBURGER to do all of the work for us. I gave them all of my sample files, and all of my specs, and they took care of all of it for me. I concentrated on inbound first and then outbound, as per normal. After that, I would check the flow-through to see that the data went where I expected it to.

In that implementation, they did 75% of the work, and I only did 25% because I was rolling out SAP. I was in charge of two plants at the time, so I couldn't do EDI all by myself. All of the departments were rolled out and they did all of it for us. The support was perfect and it was exactly what I needed.

In 2018 or 2019, we moved back to an on-premises deployment. At that point, they were able to assign the connection guy to us and then one person for the maps. He took care of double-checking and finding a way to merge the current on-premises and our former cloud processes together for us.

At that point, I was able to assist a lot more because I could concentrate on the EDI, and I also had a colleague in Germany that could work with me. That time, it was more a 50/50 process, with us helping to deploy it. We started on January 1st, and we went live with that merge on April 1st. It was a little bit longer of an implementation move but we weren't as desperate for a start date. Overall, we had no issues moving from the cloud back to on-premises.

The US SEEBURGER staff were fantastic with the second one. When we found out that our implementation was not going to work on the German one, because somebody forgot to sign us up on our side, the American people stepped in. They were able to get me up and running with about two months of prep, and then a bit more because I needed them to help me more than they should have had to help me for the summer that year.

It is unheard of to get that many customers up and running as fast as they did for us.

I will be in charge of maintenance when it's time, but I will steal somebody from my operations IT team to assist me with that. Other than making new maps, to this point, there has been no real maintenance that we've been doing.

We do not have exact figures for ROI at the moment but the one example, where we take two hours per week down to zero, is priceless right now.

I wasn't involved in the contract negotiations, but I can say that we pay per site. It is based on the expected usage per month. I would like to find a way to change this and not pay per site because I don't want to pay for a site that has one EDI turned on, and pay the same amount for them.

We pay for a maximum number of setups, then we pay per customer map, and we pay maintenance on each one of those. BIS provides the flexibility to pay as you grow. The price of each customer map is €200 and the hourly rate for maintenance is fairly reasonable.

We budgeted for ten days of maintenance at €160 per hour, for a total of €12,000. We purchased the block so that we wouldn't have to pause our operations but we hardly use it. That contract started in 2019 and we've barely made a dent in it.

I highly recommend that people negotiate strong and hard on their customer map contract. I've decreased our European one in half, and I still will fight to get it down again. I prefer the pricing model out of the USA by far. There is a significant difference between these two pricing models, which is something that I don't understand.

As part of our monitoring, we run checks to see if we're close to where we expect to stay in terms of usage.

In addition, you have to buy each adaptor that you're going to use. These include OFTP2, AS2, SFTP, and others. I highly recommend that you figure out your market and pick the best one for your marketplace, instead of paying for all of them.

We did evaluate other options in 2015, although I can't recall the names of the products.

I am not running the most recent version because I don't have a test environment, so I don't want to upgrade and risk things breaking before I can test it. The plan is to move to version 6.7 in the fall, meaning that I'd be skipping a version. The most compelling reason to adopt the new version is the security. It has a higher security rating than the current one. Also, new tools are available that I want to take advantage of.

BIS could provide real-time data insight for our organization but at this time, we're not using it in that format.

At this point, using this solution has not helped us to decrease the time to market. We're probably too far out in the company to do that. I don't have any customers that are taking business faster because we can do EDI. In fact, most of my customers are the reason that we're not moving faster for EDI.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to fully understand the differences between the on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions. Also, start negotiating early, especially if you have to do your negotiating in Europe. In America, they're much more flexible. You should definitely start earlier than we did because we were far too late.

The biggest lesson that I learned when using this product had to do with designing my own process maps. It is important to learn the map DB system because you can make it very strong and it makes your life much more flexible. For example, you can have a colleague that never has to touch a design or make changes because you put it into a process map instead. They can just use it within a table and never open the designer. It's fabulous. I would concentrate on getting the most knowledge out of that as a could and in fact, it's still what I've written down for my self-design training sessions that I ask them to do for me.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to connect via EDI with our trading partners within the EU region and with other regions, including, America.

It's an off-premise solution. We have a secure file transfer server where we are placing the files or picking up the EDI, and then they connect and put the files in or take them away. On the SEEBURGER side, we then connect into their portal so we can then see the information about the message flows, etc.

We don't yet have any examples of how it's improved the way our organization functions because, so far in our deployment, we've just migrated over what we have, as is. We've moved all of the existing connections with our trading partners and messages across from OpenText. In the next financial year, starting next month, we'll start looking at onboarding new trading partners and really making use of the standardized messaging that we have with them, for converting to the other trading partners' formats.

What I can say is that it has met all of our requirements, to date. We are in the process, in the next couple of years, of migrating to SAP, and they have two or three different mechanisms for natively integrating with SAP. But because we're not there yet, we haven't made use of that. Currently, we are using a simple file transfer protocol mechanism, but it's fully meeting our B2B requirements.

We are looking to introduce some new message types this year, such as processing vendor invoices. That would include receiving the invoices via EDI, linking that to our ERP, and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) automatically doing the processing. So we're expecting to achieve some additional operational efficiencies.

If SEEBURGER plans to do something, they will meet their target. We haven't been disappointed by them at all. For example, we had six trading partners to onboard and they said, "We'll make it happen," and they did make it happen. They did exactly what they said they would do. That's a really positive thing.

I have also had a lot of good feedback from SEEBURGER and have really been kept up-to-date about the status. With some companies, a salesperson will say something but then the technical people don't deliver.

We get a monthly SLA report. We have SLA targets with them that were set in the contract, and they report against those. So far, there have been no breaches of SLA. You can also go onto their website and view real-time information so you can monitor the performance if needed. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) I've got really good visualization.

For the area that we've used them for so far, I don't really see any way that they can make it easier. I can't say enough about how they have delivered exactly what they said that they would, and for the cost and in the time that they said it would take. They're bang-on there.

We implemented in the last quarter of 2019, so we're coming up to around six months in terms of the live environment.

At the moment, there has not been a single problem. We haven't had any issues after going live; 100 percent uptime. They've met all of the SLAs. The message-processing time in the SLA is up to one hour; in reality, it's been about 10 seconds.

There have been no performance issues and no outages. And if they do have an outage, then they've got disaster recovery plans to mitigate.

Scalability was the whole reason we went with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Our hope is to add 20 to 40 trading partners a year. Because we've done the groundwork, we've done our initial messages, we don't need to do anything more from an integration point of view. Now it's SEEBURGER's job to connect their platform to our trading partners' platforms. That was the whole selling point.

Our entire organization is the intended beneficiary of our SEEBURGER deployment. At the moment, we've only actually got it linked into our Germany and U.K. offices, but we're expanding use in the coming months into our Italy office, for suppliers, customers, and e-invoicing.

I had to raise one ticket during the implementation, and I was using it as a test, really, to see how ticketing works. They were really good and responsive, and I was kept up to date.

The ticket was actually auto-raised by the system because a message had tried to come in, but they weren't able to process it. I then received a phone call because it could have been an urgent situation. It turned out the person's sender ID hadn't been set up correctly. It was my typo when I gave the information to SEEBURGER in the new system. But it was dealt with and resolved fantastically.

So far, I have had no issues with tech support. Nobody receives 10 out of 10 because there's always room to improve, but I would say their support rates a nine out of 10, although I can't say what they would improve.

We were already doing EDI previously and using OpenText as a communication platform, as a VAN (value added network). The problem with OpenText is that they'll pass through your messages and the dealings that we've had with them, but they don't really do the message conversions and the like. And we are looking to expand quite a lot in terms of trading partners in the coming years using EDI. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we can just send one message between us and SEEBURGER and they will do all of the hard work with the trading partners. Whereas previously, with OpenText, if each trading partner had a slightly different variant of EDI, we would have to make the adjustments ourselves.

Also, all of the EDI conversion into our ERP was actually done using a bolt-on to our ERP. Because we're moving to SAP at some point, that bolt-on was not compatible. But that is where I gained my experience, because I had to create the mappings between the EDI messages and our core internal procedures.

The move away from our old solution was about the scalability. Previously, I was spending a lot of time doing the mappings myself, as well as the onboarding and dealing with all of the headaches related to that. In addition, because we're moving to a system that doesn't have that EDI bolt-on, which is the SAP solution, we needed to find an alternative. Finally, because we wanted to rapidly increase the number of trading partners that we're connected with, we would have had to take on an additional resource. That's where the price-benefit came in.

For me, the setup was straightforward. We really planned the design out together, how it would work. We had a couple of meetings at our office. They came down to visit us, both the technical people and salespeople, to make sure that the technical people were able to deliver what the salespeople were promising. We had a planning workshop, and we said, "Okay, these are the types of messages," and we described exactly how they'd be coming into the FTP server, the kind of folder structure we had to create, the permissions, etc. Once the planning was done, we implemented according to plan, and it was fine.

We had a kickoff meeting, which involved members of SEEBURGER's sales team and their technical guys. Then, we had a second meeting with the technical guys, a meeting that was a bit more in-depth about how we were going to achieve what we wanted. We had to provide information like the trading partners' formats, the trading partners' mailbox settings, the types of messages we were using when interacting with those trading partners, etc. Then we decided the best method for communicating our messages to them. To establish that securely, we had to create a VPN tunnel directly to SEEBURGER's systems and get all that tested up. Each portion of the build was tested independently and then, as a whole, we did some end-to-end tests. It went really well.

From start to finish, the deployment took about a month. It went really quickly.

After the deployment was ready, we had some additional time with our trading partners to do some end-to-end testing before switching over to live. That way, our trading partners were happy. We only had about seven or eight trading partners that we were migrating across, but from SEEBURGER's side, they just made it happen.

On our side, it was just me, and it wasn't full-time. We did a couple of hours one day, a little bit of time another day. There was more time spent in the weekly progress updates than in actually doing things, from my side. I wasn't involved doing the work.

We worked directly with SEEBURGER. I have quite a lot of EDI experience so I understood quite a lot of it and that may have helped.

Compared to our previous solution, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is more expensive. But our previous solution isn't compatible with SAP so we would have had to migrate to a solution like SEEBURGER's at some point. It has cost us more money to migrate to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but in three to five years' time, we should start to reap the benefits.

We hope to start seeing ROI by the end of this year, once we start getting more trading partners onboarded. We're paying for a set monthly amount but we have only reached about 10 percent usage. Once we start approaching in the vicinity of 60 to 70 percent usage, then we should start getting an ROI. That's not SEEBURGER's fault, that's our fault, because we're not ready to be at that stage yet.

In terms of manpower, once we start to get some of these more automation processes in place, there could be a one or two headcount reduction in terms of the related tasks.

The only thing that would be an improvement would be if they had a cost model whereby you could just pay for what you're actually using. Even if it were a minimum monthly charge that they offered, if you're not utilizing all of that then they should consider a lower tier. That way, they could attract more business.

Aside from the standard usage fee there's an onboarding cost. I don't know if our prices were hardly negotiated or whether there is just a de facto price. But, in addition to the normal monthly, system-running costs, when you want to onboard a new trading partner, there's an onboarding cost. 

If you want to do any additional types of messages, there will be an implementation cost related to each message type. If you are onboarding like 10 or 20 trading partners at a time, they also have a project management cost for a defined project manager who's your main point of contact. That's how they make sure that everything gets done according to the time that they said that they were going to do it in. I've used third-party project management before for our ERP provider, and they've been shocking. So we tend to do a lot of project management ourselves. But SEEBURGER delivered. I was super-impressed.

We looked at a company called NetEDI as well as TrueCommerce. There were two more but they were discounted right at the beginning because they didn't have time for us. NetEDI EDI was ruled out quite early on so it came down to two companies.

TrueCommerce seemed really promising but I was reading a lot of negative stuff in the press and online about them; that they promised that they will deliver but they don't deliver. The sales guy was really good, but if the tech people behind it can't do what they say they're going to do... I looked at the review sites, like IT Central Station, to find out. That can sway the impact of your decision-making.

The biggest lesson is to understand the monthly fees and whether or not you're going to be making use of all of the data cap at the time of go-live. If not, try to plan for expansion so that you're maximizing the use of what you're paying for.

SEEBURGER take a lot of the headaches away from you. That was the main point of it. We were very demanding about the contracts. We got them to amend their standard contracts to meet our requirements. Make sure that you read the contacts thoroughly and that you understand all of the implications. Know what's expected of you and what to do in the implementation in ongoing phases.

We haven't really had to do any maintenance since we've migrated to them. I am the primary contact in my organization. I'm trying to bring one of my colleagues up to speed about what EDI is, to start him off from scratch. He has no knowledge of it at all. But the main point with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is that you don't have to have the knowledge. They take all the hassle away from you. I'm just in a bit more of a privileged situation because I do have the knowledge. But the point is, you say to them, "All right, I have these five trading partners. If I want to reduce our costs, what information do you need me to get from them?" I can then request it and pass that back to SEEBURGER. Or we can pay SEEBURGER a little bit more money and they'll do it end-to-end. It depends on the skills you have in-house and how much you want to do yourself. They'll take it all away from you, or you can still do a bit yourself.

They also have other solutions that we haven't taken onboard as of yet, but we could consider in the future. They have some integrations with the tax authorities, like making tax digital. We have a branch in Italy and SEEBURGER have an Italy e-invoicing solution, in accordance with Italy's government policies. But we already have the solution for that, so we don't need it. Integrating into customs is another one, but we don't really have a case for that as yet. So it's not just the EDI, it's a whole framework of things that they can offer.

If we have any new requirements, they said to send them to them and they'll put together a proposal. It's really an area that they specialize in. When we were selecting SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we were looking at a few different other options. But they really have a high number of trading partners already with them in the automotive business. So that's hopefully something that we can make use of in the future when we're onboarding. Hopefully it will take a lot less time.

I look at the fact that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D instead of promoting brand awareness like this: If you haven't got a good product then no one's going to buy it. By putting that money back into the R&D, they're also making sure that they're meeting any new requirements that come up in B2B activity. For me, it's a thumbs-up.

They have a lot of offices globally. One of the good things for us is that we are able to deal with sales and technical people based in the UK, but they do have offices throughout Europe and America and Asia. Some of our company's regional operations are also looking at SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as a solution because they can talk in the local language. That was another really good point about SEEBURGER. And because we want to deploy onboard trading partners throughout Europe, they have people who can talk and work in the same countries as those people. That helps to take away those language barrier issues.

Also, they're a wholly-owned business by themselves. They're not a sub-organization of anyone else. That was quite an attractive thing for us. They've been around for a long time. They've got a lot of integrations into many ERP systems including the one that we are looking to — SAP. They seem to have it all.

We're primarily using it for communication and translation of our traditional EDI documents. We're an automotive supplier so a big part of our business is automotive related, but we're also using it for synchronous APIs or web services with some of our customers or trading partners.

Of course, not everything we're doing is EDI. We're doing a lot of distribution of unstructured files, even in our company, transactions between systems. With the mapper, we're doing data transformation as well, to integrate back to our back-end ERP system. We're also using the Message Tracking component, which allows us to confirm what's come in and what has processed.

About 90 percent of our global EDI transaction volume is coming in and out of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We have different application development groups within IT. My area is primarily EDI and integrations, but in some of the other areas, like HR or payroll or shipping, there's a great need to transfer files and data with their trading partners. Those partners could be a bank or an HR company or a payroll company. The folks in our other application areas don't really have any experience with communications and integrations. Where I'm able to improve our organization is that all I need to do is have them tell me, "Hey, I need to get a file or send a file to this trading partner, can you help me?" Then I'm able to work with them and get that set up and tested.

Our other application development folks don't have to spend time worrying about doing that part of the project. I'm something like a middleman and using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has decreased the turnaround time on a lot of these projects.

Also, one of the things that SEEBURGER always touts is their ability to do "any to any" formatting. I really didn't understand it when we first got the product, but what I've come to find is it doesn't matter if you want to take a CSV file or an XML file or a flat file or a PDF file or a structured EDI file; you can transform it from one format to another - any to any or even to the same format - which is a really nice feature. We deal with a lot of different databases and structures in our company. We don't have a single system. We used to have a lot of problems trying to integrate our different locations. This has allowed us to seamlessly integrate our different database products together.

One example is that we had a project where we needed to have a consolidated sales history from all of our regions loaded into a third-party product that runs an SQL database. Of course, all our legacy systems are in the iSeries or AS/400. What we were able to do, since they didn't really integrate directly with an SQL database, was to have them generate CSV files and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was able to pick them up from their respective host systems, translate them, and load them to the SQL database records. It was quite easy and we didn't have to spend a bunch of money trying to add an Oracle Database or some other database that we really didn't need.

In terms of reaction time since implementing the solution, the connectivity between unlike systems is much easier. It involves less programming. The other thing is that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is a JavaScript or a Java-based system within their mapping tool. You can actually write a lot of code in there. We can perform a lot of the translations even within our mapping, whereas we used to have to do custom programming on our back-end systems to fully integrate. Being able to put everything in one place has streamlined the mapping and the integration process. That has saved at least one-third of the time.

The one thing about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) that we really liked is that it's what I would call "platform independent." Most of our systems back in 2012 were on an AS/400 or iSeries and there were some limitations with that. We really wanted to find a product that could communicate with all platforms.

In addition to that, we really like the AS2 communication adapters, which allow us to not use a VAN and for data to be pushed between trading partners. That's a big feature we really like.

Then, in our landscape, we have a lot of AS/400s or iSeries and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has a file service listener that allows data to seamlessly be transferred between the SEEBURGER solution and the AS/400. That was a very big part of it.

There are also a lot of alerting and notifications within it that allow us, even though we have a very small staff, to manage and monitor a very large number of EDI transactions.

One of the biggest features, as well, is the Mapping Designer because that's what we were looking to upgrade in addition to just communication protocols; we wanted to get a more modern mapper that we could use for both EDI documents and other types of unstructured data.

The BIS Front End needs a little bit of refreshing, especially when it comes to setting up new trading partners and trading partner agreements or transactions. It can be a bit clumsy to copy and rename and then go in and modify. That could be improved a little bit.

Also, on the server side, there are a lot of administration and configuration files that you need to go in and do maintenance on. You have to find them in a certain folder so it's very error-prone and it can be a little time consuming unless it's documented. They could pull some of those individual configuration files into the product itself where there's a better user interface for that.

In terms of adding features, they've recently talked about a few. One is a way to manage your web services or your APIs. That would be a big help because, right now, we have four web services and there's quite a lot of setup to each. They're in different areas within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's my understanding that they're going to be able to pull that together so you can view that entire setup in a more streamlined manner. That's something we're looking forward to.

The stability is good, as long as you have the database sized correctly and your server sized with the right amount of processors. It's been very good for us.

We did run into a situation where at one point we didn't have enough memory on our servers. It became slow and we had some issues there. But once we recognized what the issue was and made a correction, it was resolved quite quickly.

So, it's very stable. Of course, we're really dependent on the Windows environment and SQL Server environment. It's only going to be as stable as those platforms are.

We've had to increase the core processing units in our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) central instance, maybe twice, and the same with memory and disk storage. We've been able to wait until the need has come and not use up all that extra processing and memory that we didn't need.

There was documentation on how to do it and when to do it but we still used consulting services to have them direct us. We said, "Here's what we're going to do. Is this correct?" and they were able to lead us through anything we needed to do to scale up and pick up more transactions or more disk space.

So, scalability is pretty good. Right now we're only running a central instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They allow you to split it up into individual instances. If we wanted to separate the US from Europe we could do that, and allocate different resources to each. That's another area where they're scalable. It's been pretty good for us so far.

Technical support is located in Germany and there are different levels of support you can pay for. Regardless of your support level, you're able to open tickets and, based on the severity of the ticket, they get back to you. They're all very knowledgeable of the system and they know where to pinpoint.

I will say that if the issue is something new to your company, something you haven't done before, they will refer you to consulting services which are billable. They won't do any development or the like for you. But they will troubleshoot problems.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is that, while they all speak English, they have a heavy accent in a lot of cases. Sometimes that can be difficult, depending upon who you're working with. Other than that, we've had no problems with their technical support.

The consulting services we work with, because we're in the Michigan area, are all working out of the Atlanta office. We're always working with them over the phone and through emails, so not onsite. They're are also very knowledgeable and they've come to get familiar with our implementation and how we're using their products. It really cuts down on some of the cost when we have a project because the consultants we're working with are familiar with our company. So, overall support is pretty positive.

In terms of response time, if it's a situation where you're saying you're down, they're supposed to call you within one hour, and in my experience, that's always been the case. We haven't had an experience where they're not getting ahold of us. Beyond that, if it's more of a question or you don't understand something, then it falls into another category and it might be later that day or the next day. That's fine. It's been good.

We have our own technical resources onsite. We have a server group and a firewall group and I'm the EDI application guy. We were used to a lot of the terminology and stuff from the past. With that in mind, I thought the setup was quite straightforward.

They provided us with a hardware-sizing questionnaire, which was really helpful in determining our server requirements. Thinking back - it's been six years - it really seemed to go a lot smoother than it could have gone, especially since it was a brand-new product to us.

Regarding our implementation strategy, what we wanted to do first was move all of our communications with our VANs and our direct trading partners into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). That meant we weren't doing the translation and the mapping within the solution, but all of the communications were done through it. What that allowed us to do was to pull all of our trading partners together from Europe and South America and North America into one place and have all the communications flowing through one area. That allowed us to support it a lot more easily and to take advantage of that AS2 protocol.

That was our initial strategy, to do communications, and then follow that up by doing the mapping, one trading partner or one transaction set at a time. And that's what we've done.

With any new product or implementation, usually there's a driving force. One of the things we were asked to do was to implement a web service in Europe that we had no expertise in and we had no platform to run it on. SEEBURGER provided both of those. They showed us how to use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and we used their consulting services to assist us with the back-end integration. So, rather than put this web service or API in another place which would eventually have to be moved to a central location, we were able to incorporate it right into the SEEBURGER product.

Our first phase with communication for all of North America only took three months from the time they loaded it onto the system initially until we were cut over. And then, to pick up Europe, we didn't want to do everything at once. We worked on Europe after that and that was another three months. So, within six months we had our communications moved over and we were then moving onto the other phases.

When we deployed, we had one SEEBURGER consultant who was dedicated to us for that first three-month period. Then we had another one who came in and did some training and some of the planning with us. As far as our own internal resources go, there were three of us who identified all the trading partners and all the nuances of what needed to be set up and tested in the new system. All in all, it was about like three internal people and two SEEBURGER people.

We worked with SEEBURGER employees.

We've had some ROI. I'm not going to be able to give you any dollar numbers, but as far as headcount in my group goes, we used to have four or five people and now it's just me and one other. We're supporting the same number, and more, of trading partners than we used to. Right off the bat, that's a good savings.

All the new adapters are individually priced, which is good. You don't buy the whole system and then, if you don't use it it just sits there. You only buy the stuff you want, which is good. There are some components that are either new or that we didn't need at the time of implementation, so we added them later, or we have plans to add them in the future.

Sometimes it seems a little pricey, especially when some of the stuff is available through freeware, like SFTP communications. You can download a free copy of something and perform those type of functions. But we understand, as an IT group, that those are not long-term solutions that you want in your core processes. It costs a lot more money to buy this stuff from SEEBURGER but I think it's worth it in the long run.

Everything seems expensive to me, so I'm neutral on the pricing and the licensing.

We wanted to be platform-independent from our iSeries and AS/400, and we wanted a more modern product for our EDI integrations. We looked at SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) vs IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. We did a lot of demos and had a lot of conversations between the two. Ultimately, we ended up choosing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but those were the two primary vendors that we were evaluating.

The Sterling Integrator was a little bit more complex than it needed to be. It wasn't straightforward. The mapper was a little bit, I won't say clumsy, but it was a little bit busy, hard to understand. One of the big things we wanted to do was to have a new refresh mapper. Also, the pricing seemed to be a lot higher for what we were getting.

Based on the demos that we had - we had given a script of what we wanted to see from both companies - the way SEEBURGER presented it was much more straightforward and understandable. We could see ourselves moving to that product a lot easier than moving to the Sterling Integrator.

If you are looking to implement SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), talk to other companies that are already using it, some that are in the same industry. That would help you feel more comfortable with what it is you're getting into, and maybe open your eyes to some of the technical capabilities that the solution has that you really hadn't even thought about yet or which weren't presented to you in the sales pitch.

I would also advise doing a lot of planning, because some of the initial setup, design, and planning you do at the onset is hard to change down the road. Take some extra time when you're figuring out how you're going to set up your trading partners, what the naming conventions are, and things of that nature. It'll make it easier.

We've established a pretty good working relationship with our sales contact, and this has been important for us. If we want to have a demo of one of their new products, we're comfortable going to them and saying, "Hey, can you tell me more about this? Hey, can you do a WebEx session to show us how this works?" It's been helpful for us to maintain those relationships.

Obviously, with any new software, training is also something. Don't skimp on that. We did it in phases. We got training on the BIS Front End itself first, and then, when we were ready to start doing the mapping, we got training on the mapping. Down the road, we took some more advanced training. We were able to do it in phases, but it's something that you don't want to skip because there are a lot of good capabilities and different ways of doing things that, if you don't know about them, you may be shorting yourself on the solutions that you deliver.

We don't use the landscape manager but that is something we are interested in. I don't know a lot about it but it keeps track of the configuration of all your implementations so when you do an upgrade, it makes it much easier to manage. That's something we're going to be looking at with the new release of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We don't do clustering. We just have a single instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) so I don't think we're using the Active-Active feature.

There are probably fewer than ten users of the solution in our organization. These are IT folks. They are the ones that really want visibility into the Message Tracking module to view the data that's come in or that went out to confirm that they're receiving the stuff they're looking for. Those transactions aren't with EDI people, they are people to whom we send a payroll file at a bank or a third-party payroll provider. The IT guys may want to monitor it.

Regarding staff required for maintenance, we have five people who are using the BIS Front End and the Mapping Designer. All five of us perform the daily monitoring activities and the trading-partner setup. We have it separated right now. We have three users in Europe and they're able to manage their own customers and suppliers. We do the same in North America. Two of us are doing the regular mapping tasks, while two of the others are occasional mappers. And one person is more of an administrator.

We have plans to continue utilizing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and to use it for more non-EDI types of activity, such as payroll, banking, HR, different sales systems, warehouse management systems, and integration between ERP systems. There is seemingly an endless number of integration projects. In addition to that, we've begun to do a lot of the web services or the APIs, even within our ERP system. So our EDI transaction activity may be staying the same, but we're using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for a lot more of the non-EDI integration and data transformation stuff; not the typical automotive training partners, rather more financial related types of trading partners.

Overall I would rate the solution a nine out of ten, which is really high. I have been really happy with it. Of all the projects where people have come to me, I can't remember having to say, "No, we can't do that." We're able to deliver what I have been advertising since 2012, so it's meeting our needs. Most of the issues we've had have really been things that we've done to ourselves. It hasn't been the product or bugs in the software. Support has been pretty good, we've had consulting services that have gotten to work with us regularly and they know us, so we feel like we're in good shape to tackle some of the newer projects or bigger projects in the future.

The only thing I'm always wanting is that SEEBURGER doesn't seem to be doing a lot of marketing in the U.S. It's a German company, the founder is in Germany, and most of their development staff is over there. Not as many folks are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) in the U.S. They're using IBM and TrustedLink and those type of products. When I talk about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), nobody knows what it is. I have to sell the product and what it can do. If SEEBURGER could do some marketing, do some reaching out to management, the executive level, to give them some visibility into this product, it would make my job easier.

While there are a lot of companies in the U.S. using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we don't have a network or a users group. SEEBURGER has offered some sessions in the past, where you could go to Atlanta and they would give you a three-day update on new things they're doing, but there's no forum for users, other than on Facebook. There isn't really a users group that I know of where we could get together and do things, have conferences, etc.

Our primary use case is to send EDI documents between our partners and vendors. We're also starting now to use it as a development tool to translate SAP idocs to EDI messages and vice versa. 

When we first started, we had different systems and application, six or seven of them, globally. Using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we have reduced the number of EDI communication tools. Now, we just have this one.

The solution can support B2B/EDI, EAI, and/or ERP integration requirements. The one thing that they are pushing is that they are a single solution that can meet all those needs. It's nice to have that in one system, versus using multiple systems.

It has also increased the level of efficiency in our company's operations by about 30 to 40 percent because everything is on one tool, supporting many people at the same time, worldwide.

The SEEBURGER solution has saved us money. Although there are other tools out there that do the same thing, if we had to buy those tools it would cost us more. The money that we spend on maintenance, for example, gives us the ability to communicate with other partners without having to use another tool or another partner. That's where our cost savings are. 

I like that the tool has all the adapters — all the possible protocols that are in the industry. You pay for those adapters but at least it's all in one package. You don't have to get another tool or application to support another partner. It doesn't matter if you're in Europe or if you're in North America, the solution they have is global. It can support pretty much anything and anyone.

It's rather difficult to understand, from the application, what's broken and why it doesn't work. We typically need to get support from them directly, and it's usually in a consulting role, to fix issues.

Also, the training they provide is not really adequate. They sell you things that you can use to design things in your own way. To get them to show you how those work is very difficult. To get them to explain how their application works sometimes is difficult (depending on the customization that was done) I would like to see them build training courses and I would have no issue paying for them. Everything I know about the application is self taught.

In addition, if we ask one consultant, we get one answer and if we ask a different consultant, we get a totally different answer. If we ask someone in Europe, even within the same company, we get a different answer again. They're not globally aligned in terms of what their application does and how it's actually installed. Depending on who you talk to, you get a different answer. You could say each consultant or software engineer has their own way of implementing BIS. They could do a better job if they collaborated more internally and talked to the customers and asked questions so that we could give them examples and tell them where they could do better.

Also, their release strategy, in terms of number of updates, is very demanding; it's very quick. SEEBURGER releases an update every month, if I'm not mistaken. It would be nice if they could do semi-annual releases that are not really needed. If something is broken, you can always ask them to provide a hotfix. We can't keep up with the number of patches they have (even though we may not need it). Every time they send a patch, we have to retest everything. They could improve the frequency of their patches and maybe provide a procedure to test everything so that we don't spend hours or days validating their latest update. We don't know what that patch is going to do. We have to test it and we need a team to test it. It's something that we do overnight. We have to check every adapter, every process row, all the modules in their solution.

We've been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for roughly 10 years.

It's stable. They're always improving it. Their next release, coming out next year, has a lot of improvements. In terms of stability, they're moving in the direction of selling a standard. That's the right way to go.

The scalability is really good. That's one of the biggest features. Depending on the size of your company, how much data you have or frequency, their solution can manage it. You can grow vertically or you can grow horizontally. It really depends on the business. They have the capabilities to grow and expand and handle all that architecture.

In North America, our company has smaller needs for scalability compared to what we've seen other companies do, although it is bigger than our European side. We do have certain things that Europe doesn't have, different components or boxes in front of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) server, such as proxy servers. Security is different in North America. We have a second node that handles more of the high-volume transactions, but we really haven't fully utilized it yet. We're just getting it up and running now.

We have two production SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) applications, one for Europe and one for North America. Behind them, there are quality environments. Behind them we have another instance for their compliance checker, which is another tool. We also have a development box and a sandbox for initial patches and upgrades.

Technical support is good. The person who answers your ticket is the person who is going to solve it. They don't typically have level-one, level-two, and level-three support. The person who handles the ticket is an expert. They're users of the system. In most cases they can help you. In other cases, they will seek the support of their developers or consultants because it's out of their scope, and that's a normal way to handle those situations. Overall, the support is good.

We had a couple of previous solutions. One was Cleo LexiCom. We also had something called EDI Gateway and that's what we were using mainly, prior to this one. 

SEEBURGER is an SAP partner. When we bought SAP, because we were going with one global ERP system, our operation in Europe chose SEEBURGER at the time. I was not part of that decision but I'm happy to say they made a good choice. 

I wasn't involved in the installing of the solution. I was more involved in the configuration of it. In terms of configuring it, I didn't find it hard. If you know EDI, and you understand how protocols work, you won't find it too difficult.

It took me about nine to 10 months to migrate from one system to a different system. That covered about 40 plants. In terms of deployment, it's quick. It's just a matter of physically doing it, getting in contact with your partners and telling them, "Hey, I'm switching from this IP address to this IP address." I found it easy.

We used SEEBURGER consulting. We already had one instance in Europe. North America had to get its own instance and I was in charge of making sure that that happened: getting it installed, explaining to the consultant that these are all the flows we have today, and these are all the software components we have today. How do we put all that stuff into one box?

Our experience with them was very good. The person that we used is still with the company.

We realized savings after five years. We needed additional development as well as some minor things that we use in our company that they didn't have in their standard solution. It took us time to understand the product. During those five years we were consulting with them and needed their support to understand their tool. After that, a company should be able to be self-sufficient.

We pay maintenance of between $75,000 and $100,000 per year. The costs are based on your original purchase solution. 

As far as I can remember, the company looked at IBM Sterling and at outsourcing.

Have a good understanding of what your business is. Understand what protocols you need to support. Know what your volume of transactions is and what the latency is of those transactions. Do you have to deliver those transactions in five seconds or do you have to deliver them in two milliseconds or do you have to do it in five minutes? If I were buying software that would be my question to the vendor: How long does your tool take to go from point A to point B?

The lessons I have learned from using the solution is that their tool can do many things. It's a full B2B solution, which is nice. They have additional software that you can tie into it. If your company ever needed something really specific to communicate with another backend application, or to convert an email to an Excel, or an Excel to an EDI file, their tools can do all that.

We have around 30 to 40 people using it or who have access to it and different components of it. Their roles range from database administrators to people who monitor the servers themselves. Our EDI analysts use it and managers use it as well. SAP level-two support people use it. We have five people who are involved in updates and maintenance of the solution, including an operating systems administrator, a database administrator, IT operations, and my team that validates that updates were done properly.

The fact that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D rather than promoting brand awareness is fine. They emphasize that quite a bit. They don't spend a lot of money marketing, like SAP or Oracle would. I'd rather them spend more money on R&D. That's where the value is. They're spending money to ensure that, with any new technologies and any new security threats or issues that come up, their application stays afloat.

We may look at SEEBURGER'S API feature but it's a little bit early. We have an API management tool already. When we went to them looking for this some years ago, their tool was nice on paper, but it wasn't a reality. SEEBURGER has invested in the last couple of years and has come up with some tools. I don't know how many companies are using it, but I think it's a little premature right now for us to buy it. But it might be something that we switch to. Ten years ago, none of that played a role in our decision. It was more that our company had been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) in Europe over the last three years and we needed to get the North American side of the business on SAP and to be on the same type of system.

Because I've seen some other products, I'd rate SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) a nine out of 10. That's only because I know what they're capable of doing and there's room for improvement. It's not perfect, but their solution is probably one of the best ones out there.

Our primary use case for it is as an integration tool. We've got lots of systems. We are a service company in warehousing and transport and we've got a lot of customers. We are a 3PL company so we do transport for a lot of the big retailers. All of this has to be integrated. We've got small applications running everywhere, so any data which flows through from one application to another requires SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Warehousing is our major function. We get orders from our clients, retailers that you know. Some of them use EDI, some use API, and some use web services. They come through our system and they get formatted into our standard warehouse management system, which is Manhattan. Order information has to be formatted in the Manhattan XML format.

On the transport side, there are different applications. We have Freighter which does the load planning and then there is route planning which is a separate application hosted by Paragon. The route planning information goes from the orders which we received to the Paragon system, and the orders also go to Freighter for load planning.

In addition, there is information from the warehouse system that has to go back to our big retail customers, such as stock received, dispatch confirmation, receipt confirmation, and any stock adjustments. There are different types of interfaces which go back and forth between our customers and our warehouse management systems.

There is some B-to-B integration and then we have application-to-application as well. For example, the warehouse management system might talk directly to the transport system, which is web-service or API-driven. Sometimes they can't do it themselves, so SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) will step in to capture the data from the warehouse management system. It will do the API service to communicate with another system and get the results and push them. So it acts as a gateway for everything coming in and out of our company, a secure gateway.

Many of our customers still use file transfer, so we use SFTP a lot. Most of the interfaces are migrating to web services, SOAP or API. Those are the latest but we still have a lot of SFTP used.

It is hosted by us, internally.

It helps in communications. It's the only gateway between our client systems and any internally-hosted or cloud-hosted systems. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an interface between them. It provides a lot of benefits to our customers. If SEEBURGER were to go down, our company would be in limbo.

It's a very vital system. We are dependent on it because we have hundreds of major customers, all of which are big retailers. Without SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), their orders and other communications may not go to the warehouse. There might be manual processes but that would be very hard.

It's been a good tool so far. It's helped us do things which we were not able to do. Most applications nowadays are third-party applications which require data in particular formats and there are restrictions on them. We can't modify third-party applications. The best we can do is use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to massage or reformat the data from one format to another and say, "Okay, if you want it this way you will get it this way."

That's what SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has been good at: communicating between two applications, changing formats and using the required protocols. Some might have applications which are very old and they can't do more than FTP or SFTP. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) we've got that flexibility. We can have one site communicating in an old FTP or SFTP style, or via file transfer. And with other applications, we could have API or a web service call or some other protocol used to send information. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an intermediary between them.

We wanted to use API. We were told that in 6.52 we could use API management. Later on, we found that API management wasn't that completely integrated into the 6.52 solution, and if you wanted to have the whole API suite you might have to go to 6.7, the latest one.

We are waiting for that. There is talk that next year we might try to migrate to 6.7. Migration is not an issue on our side, but it's the customer migration which takes a lot of time. That involves a lot of concern and hard work because we have to have the customers onboarded as well and they need to do some testing. It's always really hard to get the customers to find time for that.

It has been quite stable. We haven't had any issues after getting the system up and running. It has run very well. Maintenance is also very good and support is also okay. They've got a lot of screens and other things which help. There are proactive error notifications so we can see what's happening. It has a nice front-end screen which monitors all the adapters. If there are any issues on anything, we can see them on one screen. 

We never have problems, as such, with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but we had issues which were related to the network or the machine or the database not working, getting full, or going down. But as far as the software is concerned, we haven't had any major issues. We have had minor issues which were immediately looked at and rectified by SEEBURGER.

We have a DR system for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's all saved if something goes wrong. We have multiple data centers so it's not been an issue. We have never had any major downtime.

The scalability depends on the price - which suite you're getting. At the moment, the version we are on, which is 6.52, is quite scalable because it has one adapter engine. 

Their architecture includes an admin server and an adapter server so you can just add more servers by adding licenses to it. If we want to scale up, we just a few more adapter engines into it; it's just adding a virtual server and more functions to it. It's not a big issue. Its scalability is very good at the moment. The software installation is not a big issue. So once you install it, you can just attach it to the existing architecture.

We have a lot of end-users sending files: FTP, SFTP, web services, or HTTP; and there are other services like AS2. We have about 75 to 80 customers and they interact with us with a file or data transfer.

It is our preferred tool at the moment. It's part of our strategy. I don't know about the future, but currently it is the only tool that we are using for interfacing with our various systems. We are still hoping to host most of the system. Most systems are migrating to the cloud, so we don't know yet. There it would an application-to-application connection, so maybe the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) role might be reduced, but currently it's used a lot.

One thing we need is more support. Sometimes we get stuck on the support because they've not got not many experienced people in the UK for the suite. We have modified SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) a lot to fit our organization. We have customized it. Sometimes we find it hard to get support from their side. Most of the time their help has been good from Germany because that's what they are based. They do help but we struggled before, at times.

The second-tier is needed if there is any problem where consultation is needed to go in-depth and see what the issue might be. We lack some good help from the other side on that level.

We had an issue where the customer wanted specific things and we couldn't do it.

We were using IBM Mercator which they now call WebSphere. The move to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) started because at that time the company wanted to check into systems which could support new interfaces. The system we had was an old system, so we needed to upgrade it. It was a choice the business had to go through but I wasn't involved in the team that handled the selection.

The setup is complex but we get the SEEBURGER implementers to come out, the consultants who do it the first time, whenever we have a major upgrade. Recently, we have tried to do all the service packs ourselves, but if there is a major upgrade - and most probably when we migrate to 6.7 - we require some consulting time from SEEBURGER because there might be a major change in the way some of the interfaces or communication might be working. That might be when we require a lot of consulting time from SEEBURGER, to understand the product and what features it has and what capabilities we can use.

Major upgrades are as demanding as an initial deployment, but if it's just a service pack, it's okay now. They have made it much simpler. Because we are on Active-Active, we can do patching while the service is still running.

Our initial deployment, back in 2009, took about two days. The software deployment only takes a day or so. But we also had to get all the hardware, the machines, and network service. Those took time. But the software deployment and configuration took just a day-and-a-half.

For that deployment, SEEBURGER people did not just do the deployment, they also worked on initial interface development for us. There were new mapping tools and we didn't have any experience with it, so they did that also. We had a contract with them for three months or so to have them do a lot of work for us. They had two or three consultants who basically converted a lot of the old IBM maps into the new SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS)-format maps.

At that time it was a big project because after installation they had to do the maps etc. Everything had been in IBM until that time. They had to replicate that into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Now that we have more experience and good resources on our side, we do it ourselves. But at that time it took a total of six months, of which three months were for the initial consulting where we had two or three consultants. After that, it was only one consultant.

At that time it was a new thing for us so we were not in a rush. We installed and tested everything and we migrated one customer at a time. We had an old, IBM-based integration tool. The installation was done as a "blank canvas," and then we migrated our customers.

For a major upgrade, we set aside a period of seven days because we've got quite a few systems: a development system, a test system, a UAT or business integration system, and the production system. We go by step-by-step, so the whole process will take a week. On the first day, we'll do the development system and let it run for two days. Then we will upgrade the test system and let it run for two days to see if there are any issues. Then we will go to UAT, and after two days or so, the production system, which might be on a Sunday. It's an issue of timing because we have to get our change-control times allocated, especially when doing an upgrade to the production system.

We generally work with SEEBURGER. Once, when we had a lot of work to do, we did use a Polish company. I don't remember their name. We used them for a short period.

Finding SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) expertise is very hard. There isn't much SEEBURGER expertise in the UK. I don't think many major organizations are using it in the UK. I know they have very big customers in the US and Germany.

It's very hard to quantify ROI basically because we don't see the financial aspect it. Our job is to ensure that it is running and that we get the output and whatever is needed from it. But financially, if it was down, the impact might be humongous for our company.

The cost-based model is slightly different now in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They changed the licensing, based on adapters and other things. In the old style of licensing, the whole suite was one license, if I'm not mistaken. 

There is the license and then a run-cost.

But that's handled by my team leaders. I'm not into it involved in the cost and related issues.

They went through the selection process to see what interfacing applications were available in the market.

My advice would depend on the purpose you're considering SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for. If you are going to use it like we are using it, I would say it is a really good tool. If you have restrictions where you can't change the applications you have - you host a lot of third-party applications and you need to integrate the data between each of those applications, then SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is one of the best tools available. There are other tools, but this one is one of the best.

We may look to use the solution’s additional services such as its MFT (managed file transfer).

We have three integration specialists and one team leader for maintenance of the solution. We also have a design lead but he's not entirely dedicated to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS); he does design for other things as well.

We have seen version 6.7 and we want to migrate but we have not because migration is a big task for us. It might take some time.

We use it mostly for data integration. We use a module from SEEBURGER called Managed File Transfer or MFT. We move about 30,000 to 50,000 files in a week in our company. The files are moved intracompany but they also move between our company and our external partners. We also have a bunch of stuff on Amazon. We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to integrate our data center with Amazon file transfers.

Before this product, we used to use a solution that required us to write code and then go through the process. It would take five to seven days for our development team to do the code, test it, and then promote it. The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) MFT solution is really configuration-driven. It comes with a number of adapters for file transfers. Some of these processes, which used to take five to seven days and cost an average of $5,000 per integration, can now be done in a couple of hours because of the configuration. And they cost less than $1,000 dollars overall. We are able to do faster delivery and it's much more robust, handling large files really well. And it does bring cost savings.

It is also flexible when it comes to adding integrations. We have created some frameworks and we are able to utilize those frameworks very quickly. The solution is really handy in those terms. For example, when we bought the product, we had a requirement for transferring data to Amazon S3 buckets but we did not have a solution in our shop for large data transfers to Amazon S3. We worked with SEEBURGER and created a framework solution and now, using that solution, we can configure the transfer in an hour or two and enable it to go to existing or new S3 buckets. It's a tremendously powerful solution and it gives us a lot of leverage to get things done quickly.

It's a very robust solution and it's very configurable. Before this product we would use an ESB-type of solution which required us to write code and go through a process. We can configure the SEEBURGER solution much more easily, instead of writing code. It does its job very well, to the extent that we do not see failures in the system. It can handle large files very well, which is one of our bigger concerns. We transfer some bank files up to ten gigs in size and it handles them really well.

Larger loads can be handled either by Active-Active or Active-Passive. The Active-Active definitely provides high up-times so if one of our nodes goes down, the other nodes still continue to work and we are not totally down. It meets our requirements for "five nines".

There's always room for improvement. One of them is that the product is not integrated very well with different cloud providers. We did work with the vendor to build a solution for Amazon, but there is no solution for other cloud providers like Google or Azure. The vendor needs to create adapters so that if we have a requirement to transfer data from our data center to another cloud, outside of Amazon, we would be able to do that. 

Another issue is that support for the vendor's operating system is not available. There used to be support for the older operating system over SMB, but they have discontinued the support. They need to come up with a solution to support the new Windows operating system.

It's a very stable solution. We do not see much of a problem with it. We may have to re-start the solution once a year at the most, but that's part of our regular maintenance cycle. The solution is very robust and stable.

I don't think the scalability of the solution is that great because they have tied the solution to their named nodes and it does not allow scalability like some of the cloud products.

We have the Premium Support and we pay extra for that, and it gives us access to their engineers. It also requires the vendor to respond within three hours, if we create a Severity 1 ticket. But we have not had many problems.

We switched mostly because of efficiency and cost reasons. Our previous solution required a lot more development and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is a much more configuration-driven solution.

It is a complicated solution, it was not a straightforward setup. We leveraged their Professional Services to help us understand and architect the solutions. I do see a lot of room for improvement there, because the solution and the documentation are not very intuitive. There's a lot that could be done there. It's not like you're installing one product, it's a number of products that you have to install and configure. And there are always chances of failure. There's a lot of room for improvement.

From when we bought the product to when we took the first product live, it took us about four months. But after the infrastructure was set up it was much easier.

A lot of the third-party service providers did not have knowledge of this product. We use Accenture as our core SME but they did not have knowledge of, or skillsets in, this product. We had to work with the vendor, hire their Professional Services to do the architecture, do the installation, and to train our engineers on the solution. There was a lot of learning curve there and we spent a lot of time and money with SEEBURGER Professional Services to get to that point.

We have seen return of investment in terms of how quickly we can deliver.

It has a very goofy pricing model in the sense that they have so many components and it's not very clear what components you require to do your work. When you ask for that, you learn that there's a surcharge for them. It's not that you buy a product and you can use all the compatibilities. They have all these different bits and pieces of it and you have to pay extra for all those things.

We did a big PoC. We narrowed it down to three or four vendors and we invited all of them to come on site and demonstrate their products. We gave them a use-case scenario to implement and, based on that, we made our selection.

The only advice I would give is to see that the industry is moving towards the cloud and this solution is an on-prem solution. The vendor does not have a cloud offering, at least not that we're aware of. So evaluate a solution based on your needs.

Right now, we are deployed on-premise and we are migrating it into the cloud.

The product is being used quite a bit and it's meeting all of our needs for file transfers at this point. We are not expecting to increase usage at this point in time. We are looking to the vendor for the cloud migration and, as part of that, we may have to add more cores. The cloud architecture is different than our on-prem architecture so we may have to make architectural adjustments to allow "five nines," and that might force us to buy some additional licensing.

We do not use Landscape Manager, we only use the base solution, the Business Integration Suite. We mostly focus on the Manage File Transfer part.

We do not have any business users using the solution, it is an IT solution. We do have support teams that are the users of the solution and they're supporting and monitoring the processes. We also have a number of software engineers who are configuring processes to take the files and move the files. There are about ten people who provide support for these things, so they have access to it, along with our system administrators and engineers.

Our system administrator is responsible for running the system, upkeep, and making sure that the servers are patched and everything is working. We have a couple of engineers or developers who are using it. Right now, we are turning around about five to eight projects in a month. The developers work on some of these configurations and provide testing. It's a very small staff.

I give the solution a seven out of ten because it's a very robust product and it works well, but architecture-wise it's complicated.