SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as a service. While we were not really using their software, we might be using their software internally to provide a service. Effectively, we're using them as an integration partner.

We use SEEBURGER BIS for electronic data transmissions (EDI). It does a lot of work on our behalf in terms of the mapping and on some of the integrations which are required between us and third-parties. 

We have an integrated ERP system which talks directly to the SEEBURGER systems. Therefore, we don't necessarily have any manual interaction since this is a completely automated system which talks to the SEEBURGER back-end systems.

What would have been a manual process of transmitting data items around between us and third-parties has been automated. SEEBURGER BIS handles the automation and mapping side of the communications. The automation, along with the efficiency around time and cost, has improved our organization. Around 20,000 messages a month have been automated. These typically would be financial/order transactions and confirmations in invoicing that have been automated.

The automation is the most valuable feature. We have full EDI automation through SEEBURGER BIS, which has been the biggest win for us. It removes the complexity and makes the process straightforward.

We have additional ad hoc development costs, but those vary depending on if we're bringing on another third-party into our systems via the EDI integration. So, that's highly variable.

The speed of development needs improvement. If you acquire any customization, it can be a slightly slow process. I would like to see more flexibility around customizations. The time frame right now depends on the sophistication and customization, but we have to go through a process of getting them to develop, implement, and test it. This might take a couple of weeks. If it was a simpler system to customize, the time could probably be cut by half or down by even 25 percent of what it would normally take.

The stability is pretty good. It is rare that we have any stability issues.

The performance and operating efficiency are pretty good. We don't have any major issues in terms of operating efficiency, uptime, any failed transactions. If we do, they are generally not on SEEBURGER's end. They are usually on the other party's end. The service is pretty reliable.

We have about three people (an ICP analyst and two business analysts) who work on SEEBURGER BIS, but they don't work on it full-time.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues. Whenever we've added more components in or increased the volume of transactions, we have not had any issues.

There are about 30 organizations to whom we are connected via the SEEBURGER infrastructure.

We use it everyday, which will probably only increase. We don't have any concrete plans because this is dependent on our third-party customers, as well, and whether they have the infrastructures to support this type of development work. If they don't, then we won't. If they do, then we would. It also depends on return on investment. Some customers are more important than others.

We have had no problems with tech support. Their response time and knowledge of issues is good.

We were not previously using another solution. 

When SEEBURGER BIS came onboard, we changed our ERP systems so they were pretty much in parallel with that.

The initial setup was before my time.

People who worked on the initial setup told me that the initial setup was pretty slick.

We deal with SEEBURGER directly and they tend to do the development work on their systems for us. For recurring development work, they will do that on our behalf.

There are some third-parties involved who tend to be geographic specific and use different EDI formats. We are required in some cases when dealing with other parts of the world for EDI to go through a separate bureau. There's little we can do about that since it is just a data exchange format.

ROI comes back to automation. We are releasing people within our own organization to go and do more high value work. This is difficult to quantify for third-parties. Overall, it's an efficiency gain, which is the main driver behind return on investment.

The ROI for this is a very subjective thing to measure. We do have our own model for how we measure return on investment around things, like EDI transactions. However, it is not so simple model as providing a hard number.

Our licensing model is based on transactions. We have a base service contract which is priced against a volume of transactions and another volume of individual transactions, which are covered by one service agreement. Then, we have development services on top of that. Our annual spend is around £80,000. It's about mid-priced, as there are some cheaper alternatives out there and some more expensive ones. It's neither cheap nor expensive. It's somewhere in the middle.

Do your technical homework carefully to ensure that it's the right solution for you, because all solutions are slightly different in various different ways. It depends on your own back office systems and how your communications would work. Do your due diligence on technical requirements.

The biggest requirement that we have is resilience and robustness of the systems. If they fail for any reason, there is a monetary cost to us. The biggest lesson that we have learned: If you partner closely with them, maintain the stability. If there are any issues, understand what those issues will be before they occur and before they would be able to potentially cause any problems. The reliability, resilience, and robustness of SEEBURGER's services are the most important things.

We have had good service and uptime, generally. The resilience is pretty good. We have not experienced any problems.

SEEBURGER is established. They have a long standing presence within the market. They appear to have been there for a considerable period of time. If we had to change our systems, that would be a big upheaval in terms of the amount of work and testing that we would have to do. It's not something that we want. We would be unlikely to partner with a company if we felt that their future was uncertain.

I think it is a good thing that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D rather than promoting brand awareness. Some companies have a huge marketing spend compared with their R&D. If they can support it, then great. For SEEBURGER, the R&D is important because they need to be resilient and responsive. They need to be delivering what their services should be providing. It is crucial for us that the R&D spend continues to be sufficient.

We have no plans to expand into their API management, MFT, eInvoicing, or IIoT services at the moment.

We use the solution to tap and transform traffic. 

The tool's performance doesn't get affected by transformation loads. You can write any number of rules, filtering criteria, transformations, etc. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite does not have an end user or subscriber console which can show the traffic status. You have to be reliant on the consultants to do the customization. 

I have been working with the product for three and a half years. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is scalable. 

The tool's installation was easy. 

I would rate SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite a nine out of ten. 

We are using it mainly for EDI with a wide variety of trading partners. We do a lot of EDI transactions with a lot of our customers and vendors, as well as a few healthcare providers.

We have a lot of transactions, but we don't really have that big of a load. On a daily basis, we have around 2,000 transactions.

The EDI implementation that we used before took a while for us. Now we are able to do it pretty quickly. For the tool that we used to have, we had specially trained developers who used to do all the development of EDI maps and the configuration. But with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) now, we were able to train our EDI analysts, and because the tool has very simple, intuitive mapping capabilities, even our EDI analysts are able to develop all the EDI maps, do all the configurations, and do all the setups for any of the trading partners.

All in all, it has simplified our EDI implementation. It takes less time now.

In terms of adding integrations, whenever we have to, for example, add any new EDI trading partner, we are able to use existing maps that we have for other trading partners. It's like making a copy and creating a new map from that existing map and doing very minor changes here and there.

Also, when it comes to reaction time, when we started using this tool, initially, of course, we did not really have any people who were trained or had any experience on the tool. It was pretty new for us. Overall, the implementation time, the time it takes people to build new maps, has more to do with experience. But we have been able to reduce, by at least one-third, the time it takes, compared to what it used to take.

In general, I think the EDI tools that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has are pretty robust, pretty easy to use.

One thing that comes to mind is the service-oriented architecture. I have seen, in some of the other middleware tools, that you can create one service and then reuse it, without creating a copy. As I mentioned earlier, we create a copy of an existing map. In some of the other tools out there in the market, you can create one service and use that service without creating a copy. That kind of capability currently doesn't exist in this solution.

Also, these days, a lot of these companies are providing their solutions on the cloud. I think SEEBURGER has some presence there, but we're not really using it. For the future, they may have to provide more of a cloud-based solution.

The solution is pretty stable compared to what we used to have. We used to have a lot of memory-related issues, and we would have to restart the application multiple times. But SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is pretty stable.

There are regular production support issues, but other than those system-related issues, we don't really have that many.

Scalability-wise, I think there is still some scope but, overall, it's pretty scalable.

Tech support is pretty good. We have a Premium Support package, so they respond pretty quickly to us. They have offices in Germany and the US and they answer depending on who is available. They're pretty responsive and knowledgeable too.

We used to have a different solution. At the time that we bought this tool, we had also acquired another company. That company used to use a different tool. And for us, we were just using AS/400. We were trying to go to a better system that had more EDI capabilities. With the AS/400 we did not have a lot of capabilities that we were looking for in an EDI tool.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) fit very well with what we were looking for in the solution that we wanted to have in our company.

We utilized the Professional Services of SEEBURGER. They came and did all the installation for us. We had some of the solution architects from our company design what the system landscape should look like but, all in all, it was SEEBURGER that did the installation of the product.

When we bought SEEBURGER, at the same time we acquired another company. So it was like an SAP implementation we were trying to do and, on top of that, we acquired that other company. For us the project went pretty long because of all the complexities and all these other developments. It took us around a year or so until we first put something into production.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we just had the SEEBURGER consultants initially do some training for us. They did all the installation, and after we got the training, we did all the development and the implementation of the solution, as such.

As I said above, the tool that we used to have required those developers. We don't have those developers anymore, so we are saving that money. We have the same number of EDI analysts and they are able to do all the mapping. Because of the ease of use of the tool and the capabilities that the tool provides, we reduced the human resources that we used to need to support the previous tools. That's some money we are saving every year.

In terms of licensing also, it's cheaper than what we used to have. And, of course, the number of EDI partners that we are implementing is also a savings for us, moving any manual customers to EDI.

Pricing, compared to the tool that we had earlier, is cheaper. 

The way they have their licensing structure set up, they have a lot of different modules. For us, we did not really know if we were licensed for certain things or not. We had to reach out to them multiple times to tell them that we were looking for this or that capability. We had to buy licenses for different things at different points in time, not knowing that we could have it bundled initially.

We did evaluate webMethods vs SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). And because we were doing an SAP implementation and SAP had its own middleware tool, we evaluated SAP Process Integration. There were a couple of others. But overall, in terms of the EDI capabilities specifically, because we were mainly looking for the EDI, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stood out.

Training, of course, is really important. Get trained on the tool. If we could have used some of the consulting from SEEBURGER for the initial implementation, we could have learned best practices. Because now, when we go back and look at some of the EDI maps that we developed, now that we are experienced, we say, "Okay, we could have done it in a different way or in a better way." If you get that help in the very beginning, then you can avoid all that, and do a better design of the overall solution.

In terms of the users, it's basically an IT-supported application. We don't really have any direct business users. We have six or seven IT people who support the system. We have a team of four EDI analysts who mainly do all the EDI implementations and regular day-to-day support. We have an admin team, but we hardly use them. It's only during any restarts or any maintenance that we have to use them. On a day-to-day basis, we have a team of four people who actually provide support on the system.

Regarding extent of its use, as I mentioned earlier, we are using it mainly for EDI. We also do have some other tools in our company that we are currently using for application-to-application and business-to-business integration. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is mainly for EDI-related stuff.

In terms of usage, on a yearly basis, we have an objective where we try to increase the usage of EDI in our company. We reach out to our trading partners and a lot of our customers who are currently not sending documents through EDI. If they are sending orders, or we send invoices to them through, for example, email or fax or another manual method, we reach out to them and ask them if they have the capability so that we can onboard them into EDI. With that campaign, every year we are increasing the usage of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) by at least some 15 to 20 customers.

We have the on-premise solution. We have not used the Landscape Manager feature.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. As I mentioned, we are only using it for EDI. In terms of enterprise application integration, because we already had another tool, we don't even use that; I don't know where SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stands in that. But in terms of EDI, it is a pretty good tool. If I were to just rate it for EDI, I would rate it a ten but, overall, because some of the capabilities that other tools provide, I give it an eight.

It's our EDI translator. We use it daily, it's on-prem. It's SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 and we've been using it for eight or nine years.

We run 60 to 75 different customers, large OEMs which have between five and 15 different sites each, and every site could be a $100 million to $200 million company with its own computer system, its own EDI. In essence, our 60 to 75 customers are really several hundred customers, all sending different EDI data to us.

We use the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) platform to translate sales orders or sales schedules or planning schedules into EDI data that our ERP system can ingest. When we, in many cases, ship daily to these customers, we take our shipping data and send them an ASN and an invoice all translated through the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 software. I'd estimate it's in the hundreds of shipments per day.

It's a standard inbound gateway and a standard outbound process and it does everything we need it to do.

They were a strategic partner of the Infor Global Solutions and were a recommended EDI solution, ten years ago, for the ERP software we use from Infor called Baan.

It seems to be a very powerful mapping tool and we haven't found that it can't do what we need it to do in the EDI world, and that world is quite daunting when you think of all these customers, these OEMs, with legacy systems that have unique requirements. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) mapper can handle it because it's very powerful with logic built in.

The solution is very stable.

In terms of scalability, that's why we're going to the cloud, so we have global scale. In and of itself, I could do many more hundreds of customers through the on-prem solution, but that's not where my company's growth is. We want to use this same solution in Asia and not have something different feeding the factories there, so that's why we are moving to the cloud offering.

We use their consultant services and they're excellent.

We used their competitor. This product does the same thing that the previous product did, ten years ago. But the competitor said they were going to stop doing business and supporting the Baan ERP system. So we had to switch and we selected SEEBURGER because they were a recommended EDI partner with Baan software. We migrated all of our EDI maps to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), from their competition, and then we had to modify them, ever so slightly, to get them to work.

I'm sure the product is set up in a straightforward way. The maps that we set up per customer or per customer's site are all customized. That's where the complexity is. The complexity is the not in the product. There is certainly a learning curve for becoming an expert mapper and using the tool to do the maps, but the software in and of itself is not complicated.

We did our deployment gradually because we couldn't handle the "big bang," so we did it in six to nine months. We had all those maps in existence in another tool and we had to migrate them and then get them all working individually. We had several hundred maps to do and we did them over six to nine months. Our strategy was a slow cut-over as we tested each map using the new software.

We used SEEBURGER training directly.

The pricing seems to be competitive and the maintenance is standard.

We went with the preferred, recommended EVI translator that Infor recommended.

We are now considering using the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) solution, the exact same one, in the SEEBURGER Cloud, meaning we are not going to have it on-prem and we're going to have them do the transport and the translation to us and then send the EDI data, so we don't have to manage the server on-premise. It's the same basic concept but it's slightly more robust having them manage the maintenance of the system.

We are 99 percent sure we're moving to their cloud and that would give us the stability and scalability that we need, so we can have that same process work globally and not just be reliant on our one on-premise instance. The strategy of moving to their cloud is for both of those reasons. So the product in and of itself, on-prem, does not give you that, but the same product, in their data centers around the world, allows me to do the same functions but where I need it. We're going to the cloud in the next three to six months because of scalability, because of global reach, and standardization.

We have one user of the software and their role is the mapping development and the day-to-day coordination of changes. They monitor the flow in and make changes as needed, based on customer maps: a new map request, a new customer, or new sites. That same person also does the maintenance and the deployment. I'm looking to have the same tool globally and I will be able to contract people to do it in Asia, since they speak a different language. I will contract SEEBURGER consultants to do that for me.

I don't know if we're using the Landscape Manager and I don't think we take advantage of any Active-Active in terms of handling larger loads, as we have one instance. It's not multiple and it's not their Cloud Services, it's the on-prem SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 platform.

In terms of its flexibility, when it comes to adding integrations, it's not that kind of setup for us. We don't integrate into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We use the tools and the mapping, Workbench, as it's presented, and send the EDI information off to our ERP system. We don't take advantage of integrations.

I would rate it at eight out of ten because the current tool is planned to be moved to the cloud so we are not looking to switch. We are looking to scale it globally, so we are pretty happy with it.

The ease-of-use is absolutely amazing. What I mean is that even if you’ve never worked with their software before, it’s very easy to understand and start working with it and move on to more complex things.

The ability to design and create your own business processes, tailored for your organization’s needs, can be done with the BPM designer.

You can also use your own conversion mappings through the BIC Mapping Designer, which is another piece of complementary software.

This really makes it a whole solution that is ready to satisfy any requirements that your organization might have.

A big improvement was that this platform allowed us to move away from paper data transfer to digital, even with partners who are not EDI ready. This occurred through the use of a partner portal that made the data easily available to them in a digital format.

The advantages of having everything digitalized are clear and they are covered in detail by all EDI solution vendors, so I’m not going to go into that.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment. I would describe it as a very robust solution which is oriented towards ease-of-use. It has small bugs, like any other software, but constant patches and feature add-ons are taking care of that.

The company I work for has been using this solution for six years already, and I have four years of experience with it.

We did have stability issues in the previous version of the software, BIS 6.3.5 Q4. But the newer platform hasn’t shown any issues so far.

At the moment, I would say that we’re not utilizing the platform’s full potential, so a question about scalability is not relevant.

Depending on who is helping you, the level of technical expertise will vary.

As far as the Seeburger consultants that I have dealt with from Seeburger HQ go, I would give them a rating of 8/10.

Frontline support, or first-level support though, gets a rating of 4/10. Most of the time, they seem to be very bad at understanding the critical nature of an issue and they rarely manage to fulfill their own SLAs.

We were using BIS 6.3.5 Q4. The switch was made in order to improve the stability of the solution, as well as to accommodate a higher workload. Also, that platform was reaching its EOL.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. Depending on the amount of data that you need to take with you from the EDI platform that you’re already using, Seeburger also provides consultancy services to help with the transition. Their documentation is easy to read and understand, making the platform easy to setup.

Definitely negotiate. Depending on the size of your organization, you can get some substantial benefits in terms of pricing or services.

Solutions from AMTrix and Microsoft were also taken into consideration.

Even if it’s a good product, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need everything they offer. Make sure to test the platform out beforehand, as well as many other platforms, and try to find the one that best suits your present and future needs.

• Ability to have one system that can handle any protocol: One of the strongest features
• No need to have multiple systems for different types of communication protocols
• The software can run on any platform: Makes it very flexible

We minimized our complexity and decreased the number of systems to communicate with our partners. These are the biggest advantages that yield cost savings.

Everything now is centralized. This platform is the gate to our suppliers and customers.

• The interface and logging of messages could be more simplified. Everything is in Java and uses hash codes or UUID codes. This sometimes makes it very hard to know what has happened or what issue you might have.
• They could fix their protocol adapters so they really work with each OEM. Although it is sold with the OEM tag, you have to configure it to make it work as required.
• They tend to release a lot of service packs throughout the year, always fixing bugs that other customers report. It is as though they are building the system as time moves forward and providing enhancements.
• Monitoring of the application is very poor. You have to make custom scripts to monitor what is really important.

I’ve been using the solution for seven years.

We had issues with stability. The system is not always stable and you could have a problem at any time without notice. I think they develop it more for Linux based platforms which I hear are stable. However, we are an AIX shop, unfortunately.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. The architecture of their software and solutions is very scalable on paper. If your network cannot handle their requirements, they will offer other ideas that will work. Thumbs up on that part.

Everything is done though a ticket system. It works with a few ping-pongs of emails. The support team is knowledgeable about their product and they are always looking to help you.

During an emergency, however, I would expect:

• A higher level of support
• Help from someone who can speak English very well
• Assistance from someone who is in our own time zone: The support center is centralized

Prior to our SAP installation, we had a simple system to send data though a product called ECQ from Compuware. That product no longer exists, as far as I know. It was not very robust in terms of where we were headed in the future.

The training you receive is not that great. A lot of it is self-taught. They could do a better job of explaining the inner workings of the logic used, so that one can relate to what is going on.

It was more about learning the system and how it operates with a separate database (Oracle) in our case. You have to know very well what kind of transactions you will do, how frequently, and what volumes are going to come to the system.

The licensing model is fair. You normally get a production license along with a stand-by license and a test/QA license for testing. The customer can be flexible to some degree on licensing.

Pricing is somewhat expensive for what the system is doing. There are cheaper solutions on the market, but they might not cover everything you need under one roof.

I was not involved in evaluating other options.

Do your research as to what your needs are with regard to both technical and business flows.

If the monitoring and debugging of flows is key, then you really want to get a demo. See how the system functions and if your team can understand it.

We use it for our EDI. 

It's primarily for receiving orders from some of our customers and we then issue invoices to those customers via EDI. We also dialogue with our logistics companies who will be shipping the orders to the customers. We send messages to our logistics companies telling them about new products or batch changes or an order which needs to be sent out to this customer by that date. That logistics company will then confirm back to us when they've done so and that kicks off another process, which is the invoice. It's end-to-end in a lot of ways.

It routes electronic messaging from other companies. The benefit of that is that there's no human intervention, so there is less opportunity for errors. That's in contrast to receiving something by fax and entering it. Here, it's going straight into your system.

SEEBURGER has all the maps for a lot of our customers, a relationship with many of them already. So the onboarding is relatively easy. That helps a lot.

We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for getting orders from our customers, sending invoices out, and to have a dialogue with our warehouses. Using EDI means that there are more system-to-system interactions. That means that the people in our offices have more time to do more value-added activities, rather than just entering orders into the system.

We don't use it so that we can reduce headcount. It's more about being more efficient, adding more value to the business. Rather than sitting there mindlessly entering in orders, that is done automatically so we can use the resources elsewhere.

In terms of onboarding our new customers to create an EDI relationship, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is generally very good.

It just works. We get a monthly report from them so we can see how it's all operating. I keep an eye on that report, but it's just on a very high level. If there's any failure, we usually get some kind of email communication from them saying, "We had this downtime, some messages might not get through." We also have a portal that we can look at to see if our messages have transmitted successfully and been received successfully. We have people monitoring our messages and if there's anything that has failed then they're looking into why.

Our customers send us orders by EDI. When orders come in they go into our ERP system directly, so there is integration there.

Another very good feature is that when they're doing proactive maintenance, they always give us a lot of notice.

There might be some improvements they could make to the portal, but they're not anything that stops me from working.

It doesn't happen that often at all, but occasionally we get a message, such as this one from a few weeks ago: "SEEBURGER Cloud and Managed Services operation team has recognized a critical incident, which delayed the message processing within the SEEBURGER Cloud Service. We are handling this as Priority-One." But this was the first such message in a very long time.

I don't think there's a stability problem. I really don't tend to get many issues. The agreement we have with them is 99.5 percent uptime.

At the moment, it's doing what we want it to do. Going forward, once we start looking at our future, we might think about other things you might want to do with it. But at the moment it's serving our purposes.

We have hundreds of customers but we don't have EDI with hundreds of customers because those customers need to have the ability to do EDI too. 

EDI is a very good efficiency tool and there are always plans to increase its usage, but there's a cost involved with that. The cost isn't just the cost with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). There would potentially be changes to our ERP system. Each customer has its own requirements as well, so each onboarding of a customer is not a "vanilla" process or the same as it was with the previous customer.

Technical support is fine. We log a ticket and we get some kind of response back. It's different from what we used to have when we had a dedicated business partner who, if we had a problem, would be contacted first. They've changed their model in the last two or three years and there's now a service desk you contact and they handle it. It has gone from that very personal relationship to a more helpdesk-type of thing. And whilst that's not a massive issue if you've got all the backup of the paperwork and the history behind it, when we had that one dedicated person, that person knew pretty much everything about our system.

When I first joined, there was one business partner we dealt with regularly, and now it's that service desk. We have lost that personalization a little bit. There hasn't been a massive issue with having the service desk. And when there was that one, dedicated person, there would be a single point of failure. For example, if that person left then we'd lose all that knowledge anyway. So I understand what they're doing. But with a helpdesk, sometimes you have to explain a lot of things over and over again because they have different people dealing with different tickets.

While you might want that one person, you also need people with that technical background. The service desk provides that technical background. I understand where they're coming from, but I did enjoy that relationship and being able to pick up the phone to one person and say, "We're having this issue."

Return on investment for us on this is the greater efficiency.

There is a standard agreement for the messaging every month. But if we make a change request — a change to a mapping or something like that — then there is a fixed price per hour. We get the quotes for those types of things from the service desk. We would then approve that quote before they started any work.

My advice would be to do it. But do not underestimate the time it will take to implement it. Just because SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) may have a map with a customer, it's not a, "Yep, switch it on," and it will automatically link up. When I first started working with EDI I had no clue about it. People said, "Yeah, it's fine. It works like this." But I hit a lot of stumbling blocks, primarily because what you have to do to satisfy your internal requirements and regulations may not match up with other companies' requirements. 

We are pharmaceutical company so we have to have a lot of testing, a lot of evidence, to prove that the messages we sent are received in the way we want them to be received. Whereas for some other companies, they just want to do one test and go live with it. So my advice is to be patient and try and work through all the stumbling blocks. It's not as easy as people think, but it can be done. Once it's done, it's easy, once you've gone live.

The biggest thing we've learned is that there are not many barriers to using it. Persevere with it. Although each customer is different, you can find a way around it. It might take some time, it might take some effort, but it can be done. That is the biggest lesson I've taken from it.

SEEBURGER was very helpful to me in bringing up my knowledge on this topic. I am grateful to them and they're always available. They are a good business partner for our company so, generally, I'm happy.

In terms of users, it's our IT department that monitors the EDI messages, so there are at least four or five people there who use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). And we have the people who get involved with any projects related to EDI, so that might be another three or four people. And there are probably some people in our manufacturing department, maybe another 12 people, who are actually looking at the messages. But some of those people would not be looking at the messages in the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) portal. Only be the IT department does that. Other people look at the success or failure of messages in our ERP environment.

Regarding the fact that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D rather than promoting brand awareness, I don't really have any opinion on that. It's up to them, if that's what they want to do. For me, what's important is to make sure that my messages get through and there are no issues with my customers.

Overall, I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. We've lost a little bit of that personalization — someone who might know our business more. We're dealing with anybody in the service desk area. In terms of price, it's not massively cheaper. But I like that we've got an account manager. If I need to call him he's available. He gives me good information, so it's not like I've got no one to call. Overall, it does what it says on the box.

We really appreciated the solution itself (EDI transaction processor) and the Developer Studio. Ninety per cent of our sales order processing is automated through our SB BIS 6 system.

We have enjoyed high performance and only had a few problems. The Developer Studio and the debugging tools were easy to use. We could not function without an EDI system and SB BIS 6 is our chosen EDI system.

Error messages in the main area that could be better, but you can say that about any product.

The Front-End Monitoring tool part of Seeburger BIS 6, is a Java Web Start-based application. When a map (or transaction) fails, the errors go to a special section in monitoring, which is good. However, a lot of the times, when you are looking at the failure, it's one of those long Java.class failure descriptions. A lot of the times, in order to locate the error, you have to download the input data to your workstation, load the map that failed in your Seeburger BIS Developer Studio tool, run it there and then, debug it so as to locate the error.

One thing Seeburger BIS 6 is really good at, is enforcing standards (such as X12, EDIFACT, etc.) but, this can also bite you. When partners don't follow the standards, then the actual standard that is violated, doesn't necessarily jump at you in the Monitoring tool. You have to debug the data received and the map. This is from my experience with many tools, especially those built on Java. This kind of thing is not specific to Seeburger BIS, in my experience.

We have used the product for five years.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

Technical support was pretty good and had a fast turnaround.

We needed to upgrade our previous EDI tool. That tool did not have a migration path. We looked at many EDI tools and chose SB BIS as the best one available.

I won't lie. The setup and the configuration were both complex because it is a powerful tool.

The biggest complexity was one of the biggest benefits. Namely, you can run SB BIS components on multiple inter-connected servers, which we do.

I'm a developer, so I don't know about pricing.

No comment. We chose what we thought was the best.

SB BIS is hard to beat if you:

• Process thousands of transactions a day
• Do business in more than one country
• If you are an SAP shop

We are an SAP shop and SB BIS meshes very well with SAP. They are both German companies. I think both of their respective headquarters are located physically close to each other in Germany.