System integration is one of the major challenges present age B2B businesses face these days. Recent research has revealed that these businesses suffered due to poor data quality and lack of resources.
The survey even revealed that over half of the B2B enterprises do not have access to quality data necessary for delivering good results. Poor integration or absence of integration is one of the reasons B2B marketing data is unable to deliver results.
Lack of integration between B2B systems leads to poor or no visibility across various business processes (eCommerce, management of inventory, sales etc.).
Significance of B2B System Integration
B2B systems are important for many reasons. Here is a list of challenges resulting from no integration across B2B systems:
1. No Awareness about Customer Data
Since B2B manufacturers and distributors highlight mainly on eCommerce, customers expect added perceptibility into varied aspects of orders. One of the examples is expectations of customers for discounts and/or offers to be automatically applied to orders. Additionally, they may expect to get a view of their past order and payment history. Unfortunately, this might not happen due to lack of integration between various crucial backend systems and eCommerce.
2. Compromised ROI for B2B Systems
When there is lack of integration, overall value offered by any business to business integration system gets reduced. Efficient integration across applications will improve system’s capability to deliver on their initial assurance. Hence, the organization can make the most of their functionality.
3. Low Visibility into your Upstream Supply Chain
The performance of upstream supply chain partner can affect customer satisfaction as well as an organization’s capability to serve customers. Lack of integration across an organization’s B2B systems and upstream partners will make it very difficult to manage the manufacturing cycles, estimate inventory, and meeting increasing customer expectations.
4. Increased Costs of Sales
Lack of business to business integration can result in manual entry of the same information into several applications. This is certainly an expensive method to conduct business. With efficient integration, the sales and customer service teams of an organization can emphasize on higher value activities including growing order values, upselling, cross-selling, etc. This will help you avoid the hassles of entering and then re-entering data.
5. Increasing Points of Disaster
Potential for error increases with manual entry of information from orders. Errors are possible while doing manual intervention for moving order data from paper into a specific sales order system, and into logistics, finance, or inventory. The process may also make businesses lose crucial data. With each error, customer satisfaction level drops and business operation expenses increase.
Lack of data integration can impact several crucial business processes and customer satisfaction. Hence, it is vital to fully understand the existing state and the anticipated developments associated with the same. It also helps to know the way business to business integration can improve or transform business processes for good. An in-depth assessment will ascertain the processes that may be impacted and upgraded by integration.
