What advice do you have for others considering SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite?

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is deployed on the cloud in our organization. The solution's documentation is really poor, and we need to rely on their consultants. You can't read the documents and do the setup yourself. You need someone from SEEBURGER to deploy the solution in the cloud in two to three days. Otherwise, it would take weeks. Other products have very good documentation, and you can follow the steps just by reading the document. However, that's not the case with SEEBURGER. Their document is not up to the mark, and you need to rely on their consultant or someone from SEEBURGER to sit next to you or be available to do the setup, especially when it comes to deployment on the cloud. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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

I'm a customer and end-user. We are using the latest version of the solution. It's been updated. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It offers very good features.

I'm a customer and an end-user. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. I've been very happy with its capabilities.

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.

Going into the next calendar year, we are going to migrate to some formulation of cloud, which is kind of the way everybody's going, and then we will also be migrating to version 6.7. I work a lot in our integration for error/fault handling and reporting system metrics, making sure all the components are running, raising incidents automatically if there is a failure, and raising incidents if there is a problem with the software. Because I sort of operate in that monitoring space, I was hoping that monitoring would be easier and better in the new version. They have a new component that they have added, which has changed names a few times. This will allow us to do different kinds of file transfer, failure, and error types in any software. There are lots of different points of failure that you catch when you do monitoring, e.g., conductivity failure or transformation error. This tool will take the error logging for every kind of error and standardizes it into one stream of data into one software component. In the past, I had to read error log messages in a map and pull out very specific error reasons and populate them into the auto-generated incidents. In version 6.7, all that code that I wrote to map out those error codes, which are all different for each type of error, is all standardized and common. It is already in the software components. You don't have to do extra code to parse out and find those different kinds of errors and metadata related to each type of error. This is because it has already been standardized and put into the GUI. The GUI can also integrate with ServiceNow and other ITSM systems to auto-generate incidents. Therefore, a lot of that behind the scenes monitoring code that I have written in the past can go away because now it has all been sort of consolidated down and standardized by SEEBURGER. I am really hoping to be able to get the funding to purchase this extra component going into version 6.7, so we can move away from our sort of homegrown code into out-of-the-box monitoring. We are always looking for new use cases in the broader integration space to try to bring in and automate what our team is responsible for. There are some other parts of the company that have historically outsourced different pieces of integration. So, we are in the process of in-housing one of those now, and then there is another one coming down the road that is sort of more into the SWIFT area. Banking has this concept of SWIFT, which is an integration to the banking network. SEEBURGER BIS has some out-of-the-box functionality to offer there, which is another space where we are looking to expand services. We use it mostly for behind the scenes data flows. Other than a few cases, we don't necessarily serve up screens with metadata about the data that is flowing through the system to facilitate use cases for data insights. This is an area where this new version 6.7 also has more functionality. It can present more data for what is flowing through the system, bringing the data and important parts of that data up into the GUI so you could reach out to a business team, and say, "Hey, I know you probably use some other product for your day-to-day operations. But, what if we could serve up this data that you care about on a screen? Would you no longer need that other software that you are currently using? Because then you can just log into SEEBURGER BIS and see the data there." The solution’s ability to future-proof our business is positive because I have a pretty good sense for what is out there in our organization that we are currently not involved in as well as what we probably could be or should be involved in based on what our responsibilities are to the organization. As I look at other areas of things that we are currently not doing, then I look at SEEBURGER BIS, and say, "Can it do that stuff?" The answer has always been, "Yes." You might have to buy some more licensing, but every vendor software is that way. They don't work for free. So, I would say that the feature functionality is very broad, such that any other area of data integration that we have come across in the company that we are not supporting, which is being supported manually or by some other team using some other software, we then look at SEEBURGER BIS and we have always found the functionality there, even if we had to buy an additional license or something to turn on a new feature. Biggest lesson learnt:I have learned a ton about APIs that I didn't previously know. The software helped facilitate that knowledge because the functionality was there and I had decided to figure out how to use it. However, in figuring out how to use it, I learned a lot about how APIs work. That has been probably my biggest personal area of learning in the last one to two years: Being immersed in APIs and the file transfer space, learning all the different SOAP versus REST, and calling service operations and methods. All of that, I learned by using SEEBURGER BIS to set up API integrations of various flavors. I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

Ask SEEBURGER to provide you with information, especially around your demand or requirement concepts, and then follow up with SEEBURGER on a proof of concept. SEEBURGER is quite open to doing proofs of concept with customers, so that the customer knows, 100 percent, that this is the solution that can fulfill their needs. There are multiple options to see what they are doing, but mainly start with a request for information or with a workshop or a proof of concept and find out if SEEBURGER is the right software. In my opinion it is a Yes. Then you can align with them on the next steps. For example, you can decide if the right deployment model for you is in the cloud or if it is on-premises or something in between. SEEBURGER Cloud Services are using exactly the same software you would use to operate your system on-premises. There is no difference and that's a strength, because as more people are using the same software and participate in improving it, the better the quality will be. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself is just transporting data. It is not a data warehouse or business system. But it is heavily supporting real-time traffic. The solution has been supporting API for a few years, and with API you can do real-time calls. It could be that a customer using Salesforce requests the status of an order they have placed with us. They can click in Salesforce and, in real-time, within a few milliseconds, Salesforce is asking SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to extract that information from SAP and to bring it back to the customer within the front end. Within a few milliseconds, the customer can retrieve the latest status. With this up-to-date information, the customer can plan, update and trigger follow-up processes that move his business forward. Another example is that we have a product catalog which provides data to one of our services where a customer can check for his type of car and the age of his car, and can find a recommendation for the right light bulb. This is done with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) API management, which is embedded in their Business Integration Suite. Within milliseconds, we provide the information about which light bulbs are the right ones for that specific car, send it back to the internet page, and serve the user with that information. Customers can make the right purchase decision in the shortest possible time. Synchronous, asynchronous, near-time and real-time - everything is possible with the same platform. It's like a toolbox. I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10. Whenever I've had any concerns or was not happy with something, SEEBURGER improved things immediately. There's nothing to complain about.

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.

You will sleep well, because it's very reliable. They have good expertise and knowledge for providing solutions. If I need an EDI solution, I recommend going with them. I have mentioned a few issues on invoicing and time to answer back, but these are not such a problem. I'm not going to partner up on a technical solution with someone because they are nice in their emails and fast. I want a good, solid technical solution. When we have a need, I go to them, and usually they have a solution for us. I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the solution is that you shouldn't go too customized. We in Ingram have such a customized solution that sometimes even the vendor is clueless about what is happening in the system. They need to get our custom process, look it up in their local machine to see what we have done, and then propose a solution. So limit your customized solutions and practices. Because back in the day, if we updated 10,000 partner agreements or 10,000 partner configurations, we would go into the solution's backend database and update it. But in the long run, that might not be good because when you do interactions with the database directly, they may not be compliant. Going about it the standard way, through the SEEBURGER tool, it validates all the values for compliance. For example, it checks that this field has to be this many characters, or maybe this particular activity is a mandatory activity. But when directly updating the database, it can break. In terms of advice, the online forum and documentation are very limited. That is something that you need to be aware of. If you look at other vendors like IBM Sterling B2B Integrator or TIBCO, the forums are pretty active and all the documentation is available on the internet. But if you try to look up development in SEEBURGER, you will hardly find any videos or documentation. We know the solution and we develop it because it's been inherited in our company from 2008. The team that initially set it up transferred all the knowledge to us and we are taking the legacy forward. But if someone has to buy SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), they will need the vendor's help to develop in it because they will not see anything online. There are discussions going on about the possibility of our moving to version 6.7, but that probably won't happen until next year or the year after. If you look at 6.7., the whole idea is to move away from JBoss, which is more rigid, to Kafka and Dockers. The use case that we're looking at is to host 6.7 components on Apache Kafka and on Dockers, so that every component, be it the process engine or the Adapter Engine, is running as a container. Then we can scale up and down, on the fly, with Kubernetes and other Docker engines. That's what we are looking at. We also want to make all our systems cloud-ready, for future use. That is the reason we would be buying the Active-Active license and moving to 6.7. That way, we could spin up containers on the cloud, irrespective of which cloud service provider it is. That is where we are going. In terms of the solution automating processes, back in the day when we bought it, SEEBURGER helped us with that. We put forward our business requirements and they had their set of business processes already built-in. They tweaked that for Ingram Micro's needs and, after that, we took care of all the development. SEEBURGER has not been involved, recently, in optimizing anything or developing anything for us. An example of automation that we have done is if you look at our deployment model. Earlier, when you had to deploy a process-design project, you had to go to the server login and run some shell scripts by yourself. What we did was we created a bot, made in Java. It acts like an Ansible script wherein it executes the shell scripts and other scripts behind the server. But recently SEEBURGER also upgraded their product and they have kept the Deployment Manager that comes with it, out-of-the-box. So all the things that we did back then using a bot are now available as an API with Deployment Manager. As of now, we are not using Deployment Manager. We really want to use it. That bot I mentioned was custom made by me. All the knowledge about it is limited to me. Tomorrow, if we want to expand the functionality of the bot, I will have to develop it. But when it comes to Deployment Manager, all the functionality is being provided by SEEBURGER and if something breaks down, we know we can reach out to SEEBURGER. There are plans to move away from the bot and use Deployment Manager. We have developed a few portals that act like a wrapper in front of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), so that partner onboarding becomes easy and we can publish our transactions. Usually the basic components of a developer portal are for exposing all the APIs and giving documentation about them. With the SEEBURGER solution, we have developed something like a developer portal where we have exposed all the generic processes and the APIs along with the descriptions of the APIs. That means partners can come in and onboard themselves, and then they can start business with Ingram Micro. We have done that as a wrapper, but it's not something that SEEBURGER gave us out-of-the-box. Overall, I would rate the solution at nine out of 10. It's been pretty reliable for us, development is easy, and the support is doing a decent job. I am not giving it a 10 because of their capabilities in adopting new technologies. Also, the way they got the word out about the product was a little old-fashioned. Recently, they have been doing a good job on that, but I think they could go farther. Their competitors have flourished in the market a lot. SEEBURGER was lacking in marketing, but they have recently become more active. They have regular meetings and they have workshops, to be competitive and to talk about the new technology and capabilities they're working on. They have started to improve on that side, but I think there's a long way to go.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that integration is always possible. I have learned that there are many ways to integrate and exchange information in a timely and accurate way. Having accurate information on time is the most important thing for me. That's the way other people can make decisions. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) helps you to do that. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides us with the solutions we need. We will see with version 6.7 if there is something else. I know there are more features in it. But for now, with version 6.5.2, we have all that we need. We want to see if 6.7 will give us other things that we can use. To be honest, for us, the most compelling reason to upgrade to 6.7 is the end of support for our current version. If we don't upgrade, we won't have the support. But at the same time, the new version should have some improvements that will make things easier in our jobs and daily operations. I have heard that it has many new applications and a new portal. We could survive with the current solution, but there won't be fixes for it any longer. Also, it's good to have a new version with new APIs and new features.

It's a good product and tool. We are happy with what we have, which is why we do not consider changing it in anyway. It is also priced right. We don't use the newest features yet, like when it comes to API or regulatory requirements. We are not planning to go to cloud version yet, but I believe they have 6.7 for the client version as well. We are not planning to go to this yet because we just converted to 6.5. If we see benefits of going to 6.7, then we will do it in the near future. However, as of now, we have no plans yet. I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

We're not going to start integrating until we install the new API module for 6.7. We haven't integrated with anything beyond EDI and local network systems. It does not provide everything in a unified platform without needing to add a third-party solution. We've had to use a third-party API solution. We are going to start using their APA solution sometime next year, but currently, they did not offer the API functionality that we needed until the latest version, which we are not using yet until next year. We do not utilize their offerings for invoice trading and other regulatory things. We did not use them for compliance. They offer it but we don't use it. We areyet to see if 6.7 delivers as much as they say it does. 6.52 doesn't need some of those future technologies, which they fixed with 6.7. It was very difficult for us to have to purchase a third-party, but now that it's here in 6.7, we are excited to proceed forward with that. They've added a bunch. In 6.7 they've added the big cloud connectors for AWS and Azure. They've added the data lake, and so I would see that in their latest version, which we're not currently on. I am cautiously optimistic for the next version. It's best to have an understanding that the system will function as you create it. They give you a great set of tools, but you need to have a full understanding of how those connect together before you design your full op process. Because if you jump in without understanding the full workflow between entities and routings and forwardings, if you do not understand those three things, you're not going to understand how the system works. My suggestion would be something very similar to what we did is to pay for the SEEBURGER Academy. Get that training so you fully understand the SEEBURGER vernacular and how the system works. Take that before you develop your implementation plan so that you understand how things flow. Then have professional services come in to help you establish the first couple of connections or entities. My advice would be to utilize the pre-processing and post-processing workflows as much as possible. Beforehand, we would restart a file processing four or five different times to get the data where we need it to be in the ETL transformations. And years down the road we learned that we could do most of those transformations within one workflow. So we could have kept things a lot cleaner, we could have kept it down to two more steps and less processing power had we been more aware of how the pre-processing and post-processing ETL modules worked. I would rate SEEBURGER BIS a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

The fact is that we use it for everything. It's pretty good really. My advice would be: Don't hand the initial development over to SEEBURGER itself. When we first put the product in, the SEEBURGER consultants that came along wrote very complex interfaces for things that didn't really need to be that complex. We're only just removing some of those complexities, because it's not really very supportable. The best thing would be, if you're doing it the way we do it, to either hand it all over to SEEBURGER and let them look after it, or if you're keeping it in-house, get your people trained to the eyeballs so that they can do the initial system setup themselves. In our environment, there aren't really users, per se. We allow some users within IT to view the front-end, but that's ten people at any one time. However, as I say, the number of processes that run through it in files, that's what we consider to be our user base, and it's in the vicinity of 300,000 per week. We have a team of four to deploy and maintain the solution. We call them the integration specialists or EDI specialists. The fact that SEEBURGER invests a high portion of revenue into R&D, rather than promoting brand awareness, is good for us. Some local companies use SEEBURGER & they usually take it on because they need some aspect of the system that isn't provided for by any other systems. We have plans to use one of the solution's additional services, the API management. We use our own, in-house MFT, which we don't require to become cleverer than it currently is. It's a very simple sort of system. But the API, that's the new kid on the block, which we will start working on. We're starting on that path. That will be work that happens this year, probably when we migrate to 6.7. That's when the API management will come in, in a major way. It's not so much our customers who are driving that, it's more suppliers.

The biggest lesson we've learned throughout our time using it is not only a lesson with SEEBURGER but with all remote vendors, because everything was done remotely. That meant we had to be very clear in communication and in logging issues and tickets with them. And it required a large amount of testing because even though there's the standard format, every customer does something different or has different requirements. We probably underestimated the testing required. Those were the two big lessons for us. It was quite late in our project that we established that our VAN provider couldn't communicate with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). So my advice would be to establish that upfront. Make sure there's a really good ticketing system and any issues are well-documented because the implementation is going to be remote. Also, have a very good estimate of how many messages you process so you can buy the right package or service level from them. We have simplified how we track errors because at times there will be maybe an issue on the customer because a product is not set up, for example. We batch our invoices, so we would need to find which files need to be resent. We've simplified that, but that's done in our ERP system. The other simplification we did, which was SEEBURGER-related, was that we update the status of our SAP documents which communicate with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). That was an improvement for tracking errors because now we just go to SAP to find out the status of an IDoc. We have the status that it was sent, whereas before, we would only know that it was sent to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) system. That was an improvement for us. I don't think SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has saved us money. We had an on-premise system which was at end-of-life. The service charge replaced the maintenance on that. So it's about the same, maybe a little bit more. It's good that they're putting effort into R&D, rather than investing in brand awareness, but if we, as a potential customer, are not aware of it, we're not going to look to use it. I'm not overly aware of what SEEBURGER is doing or how they can help us. They have tried to have meetings with us sometimes but we're very busy because we're now in the middle of doing an ERP migration. I've heard the solution can transfer other documents, like PDFs and marketing documents and that it can do other things besides the standard EDI messages we use. But currently, we have other tools that do that sort of stuff, like Microsoft Azure, etc. I don't think we have any plans to increase our footprint with SEEBURGER at the moment. We only have two users of the solution because it just works away in the background. It's like a blackbox solution to us. The only time anyone would have reason to go into it is if we had a problem. It doesn't require much maintenance from us. And really, there's not much we can do either. We can just see there's a problem and then log a call. I would rate the product around a seven out of ten. The product is reliable. We don't have any outages. We do get the messages. Everything is converted. And there is a query tool. It's pretty basic. I would like to see more features. And I would like to be able to do a bit more to troubleshoot, rather than having to log a ticket straight away. They're quite pleasant people to deal with. It's just getting the resources. They did have a resource issue when we were doing our implementation and there was some restructuring happening at their end.

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.

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.

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.