SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

EDI with automotive businesses is our primary use case.

For us, it's all been about the fact that, for the first time ever our two facilities can support each other. Before, we had completely separate systems. One was doing EDI and one wasn't and our customers were trying to understand how we could be one company and not do things the same way. For the first time, we can start doing things the same way. That means that I can have customer service in one facility support customer service in the second facility.

We started with our Canadian plant first and got it running. When the next plant came on we were just able to say in SAP, "Here are some new ship-to's." We didn't have to start re-testing with the customer. That saved a ton of work. Not needing to retest for the next facility, because the customer had accepted our first test, was very helpful.

In terms of our reaction time, I can say we are 50 percent faster from our American plant. We aren't faster in our Canadian plant, but that's only because we're also looking at trying the on-premise, so it's just from looking at too much at once. For the American side, they wouldn't say "yes" to a customer for years, but now they can, which is great.

It has a lot of basic EDI already established for all the main users.

Also, it lets me share setups that I had already set up for my first plant. I was able to use them for my second one which was very helpful. I didn't have to start from scratch for my second facility.

I would've liked, from day one, to learn how to do my own mapping. It would have saved a lot of time and effort if that had been brought forward earlier. It's there, I just didn't know about it.

Also, some tidier, easier-to-use interfaces would help.

It's a stable solution. In the year-and-a-half that we've been live, we've had one or two tiny blips. But you get the warning right away and you can reissue it. And it never repeats itself. Those are pretty good stats.

It's far bigger than we would ever need. Our company would never have an issue with their scalability. It goes far and beyond what we need.

I know my colleague in Germany values the technical support greatly. But the system works so well that he generally only needs it if a customer sends in a map that isn't straightforward. For me, on the on-premise side, the American tech support has been super-helpful and they bend over backward for me. If we could all have Daniel work onsite, that would be a dream. But they're all super-helpful. Everyone has bent over backward for us.

We went to SEEBURGER because we needed a global solution for the first time in our company's history. Up until then, each plant used to use its own EDI solution, because we had our own ERP solution. We switched to SEEBURGER to have a global solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I gave them an Excel and they did the work. I liked that.

Due to SEEBURGER jumping right on board for us in America, we did it fast. We didn't start talking until about the end of March, and we went live July first. So the workload was heavy from the end of May and June. There was some cleanup of some stuff after that, but they really pushed hard for us.

We were supposed to have set it up with SEEBURGER Germany, but somehow that got missed. So our implementation strategy was to jump on with SEEBURGER America. They were super-flexible and they helped us get all the information and make sure we were ready for the first plant, and then we went live in the second plant in October.

The only problems were caused by us because we didn't have enough manpower here.

I find the pricing expensive. But I know that when we evaluated another company, it was about the same. That just seems to be the market. It's probably not expensive overall.

Make sure your internal team has the manpower required and the knowledge, of course. It's big. It shouldn't be left up to SEEBURGER, the way I did. I made them do more work than they should have had to do.

To use the on-premise you need to have good technical people, not just business knowledge but also technical. That might be a drawback for some companies. The advantage is that they cover the EDI world: EDA, EDIFACT, ANSI. The American guys are great at their ANSI and EDIFACT and the European guys are great at EDA and EDIFACT. I don't know if it's true that every software company out there is able to cover all three of those worlds as well as these guys seem to.

In North America, there are only two of us using the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Cloud version. It's 90 percent me doing all of the checking, communicating, and updating with the SEEBURGER team and my one SAP team member is there to back me up or answer questions. I don't think he's been on it since January 2018. We have two solutions, we have cloud and we have on-premise. Two more people use the on-premise.

Our plan is that we're actually moving everything to on-premise now. There will be two main people, myself and my colleague in Germany, who will be to the two main people for maintenance, and we're looking at one minor role in both Europe and America that will just be there to get the alerts, making sure there are no stoppages during the day. But the two of us will be the ones installing maps. If there's a map adjustment required, I would work on that, but the two of us will be doing the installing and mapping of the communication and new users.

In terms of the extent of usage and plans to grow, we have three plants using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), two plants on cloud, one on-premise. We just moved a small plant to on-premise last month and our plan is to move two more. Then, as our company rolls out SAP, we're looking at moving three more. If Asia jumps into EDI someday, it will grow even more, but right now the Asian market isn't using EDI. We'll see how that works out. We're hoping to, within the next year, move a Spanish plant onto it as well.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten because it covers as much as it does. It's not higher because I think it might be missing a little bit of the non-automotive world. They focused on the big EDI-hitters, versus some of what I call the "industrial applications." That's the only place I've seen where it doesn't seem to be as strong.

We use the solution for EDI and file swaps, but it will be used for all integrations going forward.

We can control our upgrade cycle instead of being dependent on cloud vendor timing. We are also able to build and deploy quickly, but our speed is limited by our SOX controls.

• Scalability. We have not had to add processing power or hardware since we installed it.
• We are able to create and deploy maps to migrate from another EDI platform very quickly.
• The Active-Active feature probably also helps but it's hard to say for sure because we didn't have much load on the system prior to implementing it.

A true debugger that allows you to step through the process would be a good improvement. Right now, we are limited to reading the log file generated by the test screen in Mapping Designer.

It is very stable.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is highly scalable. Since moving to Active-Active we have not had to change our environment.

Technical support has always been great.

We switched from Dell AtomSphere.

The initial setup was somewhat complex. I would say you need SEEBURGER Professional Services to help you through it.

Deployment took a couple of days for each environment. Our implementation strategy was to deploy to our Dev/QA environments first and production at a later time. We deployed on-premise as we prefer to control the environment of our mission-critical systems.

Pricing has always seemed fair.

We evaluated:

• SEEBURGER BIS vs Dell AtomSphere
• SEEBURGER BIS vs Software AG
• SEEBURGER BIS vs MuleSoft
• SEEBURGER BIS vs SAP PI.

Create a matrix of criteria to evaluate all tools fairly.

In our company, we have ten to 12 users of the solution and they are very technical development/support people. Deployment and maintenance are shared among a team of people but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) requires almost no maintenance.

• We use it for handling partner setup, dealing with XML, EDI transactions, and mapping.
• We can do job scheduling, process designing, AS2, FTP, and SFTP setup in it.
• We can use it to script and monitor processes.

Benefit of Seeburger to GenTran (which we most recently had): In GenTran, if any batches had incorrect data, whole batches got errored out. While in Seeburger, only that particular data gets impacted. It allows other batches to flow.

• One solution for all integration.
• Fault tolerance. We rarely get hanged processes. Therefore, it is reliable.
• We can code in Java, which is really good feature. There is very vast command available, which can be used in mapping.

Difficult in handling large amounts of data, like when the file has more than 100MB in size. Therefore, our organization had to purchase another server to deal with this.

I would like there to be a feature that could handle the limited server.

We recently migrated from the GenTran mapping tool to Seeburger.

Partner connectivity and the process builder are the most valuable features.

• Partner Connectivity: This is the core value of the tool. It enables communication between two systems/business partners.
• Process builder: Helps us to customize the application to the needs/requirements of our customers.

It enables customization as per the organization's needs.

The connectivity of the Data Distribution Center (DDC) and the repository need improvement.

There were no stability issues.

We can integrate any custom Java program directly with Seeburger BIS Suite. Most of the components are loosely coupled.

It has helped our organization to integrate with different systems, by having different integration methods seamlessly.

The documentation can be improved.

I have used this solution for six years.

There were no stability issues, as such. Since this is a software solution, it may have bugs that get fixed, i.e., when we raise the necessary concern with the vendor.

This product is highly scalable.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We did migrate a few IBM Systems with the Seeburger, as the licensing cost is less and it gives the same flavor as the BIS Suite.

The setup was a little tricky, but the vendor always helped us with the installation.

This is the best product that there is in the market.

We evaluated TIBCO and Axway System Integrator (SI).

It is a great product to work with, especially with their new cloud solution. Companies do not have to worry about any in-house infrastructure.