SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

We primarily use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for application-to-application integration and for integration with external partners. We have the entire SEEBURGER suite deployed in our external VLANs, and it's primarily responsible for communicating with internal systems as well as external partners. Once we communicate with them, we exchange EDI messages, XML messages, and APIs, and then we convert them to the appropriate ERP format. We have SAP as our ERP as well as IMPulse, and other internal applications. We can merge the data into appropriate format, and then we forward it to the corresponding applications, downstream.

It's completely on-prem. Back in the day, when we started the alliance with SEEBURGER, we bought their entire product and everything was installed on-prem. All our solutions are custom-built by us, as part of our business process needs.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), as an application within Ingram Micro, contributes around 30 percent of the revenue. We have different XML channels—we have Apogee and we have TIBCO as a middleware for XML and APIs. But we use SEEBURGER for XML as well as EDI. SEEBURGER is the only EDI middleware that we have in Ingram Micro for retail and logistics, and EDI comprises $16 or $17 billion in revenue per year.

The solution provides a unified platform without needing to add third-party solutions. It makes things easy and convenient because the development that we do is within the product itself. The entire suite for development is limited and focused only within SEEBURGER products. We know that if any upgrades are causing a bug, they are not because of any third-party software that we installed. That helps us greatly in terms of operations because we are in control. We know that there's only a single point of contact if something breaks down. We don't have to run around or read through blogs. We know that SEEBURGER is the only company that can answer the question. And the response from them, while it's not that fast, is okay. They're doing a good job.

The SEEBURGER Mapping Designer is very comfortable and easy to use. We have also worked with the SEEBURGER Process Designer, and that is also a very easy Eclipse plug-in-based utility that you can use to define your own BPELs. Those are the two most useful functionalities.

We also use the Adapter Engine and the process engine. The Adapter Engine is primarily hosting all the services responsible for communication. We have different adapters for different protocols—HTTP, AS2, SFTP, FTPS, JMS, and all the native adapters that we have.

The process engine is responsible for data orchestration. It is a central repository where your process is deployed and all your BPELs are deployed. As you receive files, a process is initiated in the process engine which executes your business workflow, and it uses adapter engines whilst executing and completing the process.

The entire framework is something that is very easy to use, easy to set up, and extremely straightforward. Once you develop a process and once you get it deployed within the process engine, with the latest 6.52 features, the processing engine is actually smart enough to make a decision as to which process engine has less load, and it can exchange messages with that process engine.

Another functionality is called Move-To-Production. It actually validates everything before it completes the movement from QA to the production system. From a compliance perspective, that helps us during audits. We know at any given point of time what was changed, when it was changed, who changed it and the ticket reference number associated with that change.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) also has a feature called Message Tracking. Message Tracking is used by the support team and by the business to know the status of transactions of different partners. If you have an order number from the partner, you can actually key it into the Message Tracking portal and it will give you the details corresponding to that order number.

And then there is a module within Message Tracking, an extended message search, that gives you the flexibility of searching for wildcard characters. For instance, if you have an order that has been shipped to James Snow, using the extended message search you can find all the orders, regardless of which partner is involved, that have been shipped to James Snow. It does help us in that way.

All of these features are extremely beneficial.

There are a lot of things that can be improved. One would be integration of the different products into one. Today they have their API management tool, they have the SEEBURGER legacy front end, and the entire BIS. In the BIS, if I want to have some API functionalities, that is a separate tool. The integration between the API tool and the BIS is not that straightforward. If they were to combine these tools and give us one suite, that would be helpful. Today I have a lot of partners onboard. I have something like 50,000 partners doing API transactions. If I want to introduce a new tool for API management, I have to do a lot of workarounds. But if it were integrated well within the existing suite, it could be straightforward for me. I would not have to reach out to all those partners and request that they change something. I could deal with that internally, within the suite itself. 

There are a few capabilities that have come out a little late. TIBCO introduced its container edition way back. It's been on the market for three or four. SEEBURGER is only in the initial phase of 6.7. If SEEBURGER could come up with and adopt changes really quickly, that would be better.

Their ability to future proof our business really depends on what sort of development they do and how fast they adopt changes. They are a little slow in releasing newer features. We are hopeful that SEEBURGER will change their internal processes to adopt changes a little quicker.

The company has been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for 11 years and I've been using it for around nine years.

It's quite robust. We haven't seen any memory leaks or performance impact with the product. We assess the system and continuously monitor the JVM and the application for performance. When we think that there's a need, we scale out. But if the load remains constant, there is no question about the performance or the robustness of the tool.

Scalability is a little challenging because of the way we have set up the solution. Back in the day, it did not support Active-Active, which would give you the flexibility of managing your transactions across process engines. If you receive a file and it's executing within a process engine, it's very isolated to that process engine. If the process engine is loaded up with thousands or maybe millions of records, it will wait until it all gets flushed out and then start processing the next batch. But with Active-Active, there is the flexibility where it can share the workload across different process engines, and this now comes natively within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). 

Initially, we did not have that, but have with recent in-house development we have that functionality. We adjusted our architecture in a way that we leveraged load balancing and internal configuration for Active-Active, but it's not SEEBURGER Active-Active. Now, it can actually balance the load across different parallel instances. But having said that, every instance is still a singleton instance. It cannot share the load with any other process engine.

But moving to version 6.7, I think scaling will be a lot easier and it will be on-the-fly. But scalability, for us, has been kind of challenging because we did not move to Active-Active.

Our business is contacting resellers and other partners and we do onboard a lot of partners on a weekly basis. The business is something that is growing.

As for the number of users, it is different for the different components. There are 200 business users who go into Message Tracking and check the status of their transactions, download or review a file, or review a process and whether it ended properly or not. We also have 40 developers working on different parts of development in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). There are another 10 users from our support team.

SEEBURGER support is doing a decent job. We are not using any of their standard solutions. All the solutions we have at Ingram Micro are customized. So they usually take a little longer to respond back because they do not know what sort of development happens within Ingram Micro. If there is any bug in a specific process, they definitely don't know about that process because it has been developed and customized for Ingram. So they usually take a little bit longer in responding, but the majority of the time they do a fair job there.

Before SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) we were running more than two applications to support the entire external partner communication. The partner connectivity gateway had something named Cyclone which was used for communicating with external partners. And then we used Gentran, an IBM mainframe product, to take care of conversion. When we put in the SEEBURGER solution, we replaced Cyclone and Gentran with just the one product. Recently, we have migrated a lot of other legacy softwares to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as well.

One of the reasons we switched was that development was easy in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Second, the old system was going out-of-support and we needed some solid middleware that could take care of all the existing workflows for us. We found the SEEBURGER solution to be very easy and straightforward, so we went ahead with it. The third reason we went with it was support. We did not have premium support with the old application that we were using. Familiarity with the tool also played a part. We started our SEEBURGER journey in 2008, so our team was very familiar with the tool. Everyone had good hands-on with the development and we were pretty comfortable in that area. So we proceeded with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). When you have a familiar tool and you know that the tool is good in terms of performance, that it is robust and reliable, you definitely have that choice in your mind when you propose a solution.

The initial setup was complex because we were migrating from multiple solutions.

In general, the setup doesn't take that much time. It's straightforward. They introduced Deployment Manager a couple of years ago and Move-To-Production was introduced about four or five years ago. But we have had this tool from 2008 and back then there were challenges in deployment. It was time-consuming and more manual. But now, with recent changes, deployment is straightforward.

The amount of time it would take nowadays would depend on what type of deployment we are talking about. There are different components. One of  them is map deployment and that doesn't take more than a couple of minutes. The deployment for process is less than a minute, but it depends if you are changing the entire form of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). In that case it might take like more than a minute. But if it is a lightweight project that doesn't touch the built-in forms, it should take less than a minute.

But to deploy the entire suite would take time because you have to have a database before you go ahead with the deployment. You need to allocate the schema for the specific instance and then you need to start working. If you have the database ready, and you have the network setup between the database and the firewall in place, I don't think it would take more than 30 minutes to deploy a new SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) instance.

It could be handled by a person. But usually, when you talk about an enterprise, there are different teams for handling the database and the application. If the database and the operating system and the network and firewalls are ready, I can go in as a SEEBURGER expert and SME, and install their product. As part of the installation process, it will ask if it is for a process engine or for Adapter Engine and what the database is. It will ask what port it's listening on, as well as what the service name is, etc.

Because everything is on-prem, we take care of the deployment. SEEBURGER is not involved in anything. They just release regular patches and upgrades to the system. We download the patches and software from their website and we install it. We upgrade the system and we manage the entire SEEBURGER suite in Ingram.

They are only responsible for severity tickets. We have a premium-level agreement with them for support, just in case we have a production issue and we are not able to figure things out. We can raise a "critical" and then they join a call or discuss resolutions via email. That is the only place where SEEBURGER is actually involved.

SEEBURGER is moving to a more containerized architecture with Kafka. So if you want to move to a more containerized framework, that is with version 6.7. If we move to 6.7, that is when we might involve the vendor to lay down the design and provide the integration strategies.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, there are six people involved, five working from India. I'm the one in the U.S.

I don't have exact numbers, but the return on investment is pretty good, given that it generates 30 percent of our revenue—around $16 billion—and we only pay for support for the year. The ROI is pretty good.

The solution provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow. SEEBURGER has a lot of offerings, but ours was completely on-prem. We paid one time. With our license, it doesn't matter how big or small your solution is. It doesn't matter how many servers you deploy the solution on, whether it's 10 virtual machines or 100 virtual machines. It is still covered in the license agreement. Our license is unlimited.

That agreement was until version 6.5. But if we move to 6.7, I'm not sure if we will need to renew the agreement.

We only pay for yearly maintenance and support.

We do have TIBCO, which we were using back in the day when we purchased the SEEBURGER solution, but it is limited to being used for internal communication, not to communicate with external partners. One of the reasons is that it was costly. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is way cheaper in terms of maintenance and support when compared to TIBCO.

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.

We are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for any kind of integration, but mainly in the areas of B2B, A2A and API, and even data-lake related topics. We do not have any limitations in using it, so if a special integration demand arises outside the integration patterns described, we can be sure that it is always possible.

It's a hybrid. Some parts are on-premises and other parts in the SEEBURGER Cloud.

On the one hand, when we are talking about classic integration like EDI, we have countries in which we do a high percentrage of our revenue with B2B. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides significant value in handling such things in an automated way. All the automation features are quite important. But even if partners ask us to provide integration capabilities, we are able to meet their demands. When customers ask us, we don't generally need to decline.

With the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we can deal with each and every demand, whether it is EDI, or the customer or partner wants to have another type of interface with no direct relation to EDI, or even modern approaches like APIs. When a customer or partner asks us to provide an API on their side, while our internal components are not API-ready, the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can make them API-ready. Think of an SAP IDoc. You can take it, you can translate it to an API-related data format, and communicate with an API. To the outside, no one would recognize that this is coming from an old-fashioned IDoc.

The solution also helps us automate processes completely. All of the processes inside SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) are made for doing a concept, doing a setup, doing a test and then, usually, you no longer have to touch them. That means it's fully automated, either by a task scheduler, or even better, by events. Whenever someone from the outside is sending data, it could be fully and automatically booked in the remote system. Or when we're picking up a mailbox, it is done with a scheduled job within the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), and the data will be processed completely without touching it.

The automation has definitely helped to reduce our costs. For example, in the automation of interfaces, EDI is the biggest portion. It's a significant KPI in the majority of the countries in which OSRAM, our company, is working. Sales automation quota is usually part of the management reporting and should indicate how many interfaces and how many documents can be booked completely without touching them, and as a result, free up resources to support business partners more. Some years ago, a calculation said, that a person in a customer service center could handle between 60,000 up to 100,000 sales orders per year, when keying them in manually. With data-driven sales automation you can free people, to care about more individual requests, and generate leads more effectively than ever before.

It also helps us to keep up to date on regulatory requirements, from two angles. On the one hand, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has an evergreen approach, so you do not really need to do updates. You do service packs or hotfixes all the time so you do not have to do a huge update project. Service packs also come with new functionality. For example, some years ago, OFTP1 over dial-up lines was replaced by OFTP2 over IP-based lines or internet traffic. This was then the default that came with one of the next service packs. On top of that, SEEBURGER is asking their customers what they need. It is not only about what SEEBURGER thinks the customer needs. You can give them input. If you tell them that new technology might come up, they see if it can be a part of the next service pack.

Another benefit is that it has helped to decrease time to market in our business. Whenever we receive a request from our project teams, usually within a few minutes we can set up an API. When we receive a request, we schedule it, of course, because our calendars are full of topics, but if you want to create an interface like an API, it can be completely done within a few minutes.

One of the most valuable features is the option to have all integration patterns constantly updated in one platform. That is the main strength I see in using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It means I can use a very old-fashioned integration pattern, combined with a very modern integration pattern. There are no limitations in terms of combining components because all the components simply fit together.

SEEBURGER's support for multiple integration patterns makes it the best choice. I know many integration solutions, but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is the only one with such a huge catalog of options that you can use out-of-the-box and use as plug-and-play.

All the topics we've identified have been placed on the SEEBURGER roadmap already. Our company is part of the SEEBURGER customer advisory board where some customers have been asked to give feedback. We give very open feedback to SEEBURGER, telling them what is not working properly. And all of our topics are already on the roadmap. They are close to their customers and try to fulfill their needs. Whatever needs to be improved will be there within one of the next service packs.

Among the things we have requested are improvements in the user interface and improvements that would be implemented by completely new modules or improvements in their Cloud Services. For example, because we are a global-facing company, we've recognized that we not only need some well-known e-invoicing mechanisms available over the SEEBURGER Cloud, but we need many. Even if there are smaller ones which are not well-known, the expectation is that SEEBURGER can provide them to us. SEEBURGER responded to that demand and provided services for countries where they've not had this before. The feedback on usability topics has been converted by SEEBURGER into improvements. We see them coming, step-wise, with each and every service pack.

We have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for nearly 20 years.

The stability depends on what you need. We are operating a module so called Active-Active, together with the DataStore. The Active-Active component takes care of allowing multiple machines to work as a type of cluster and they can replace each other. If you have multiple machines or multiple nodes on which Active-Active is running, you can distribute the traffic to all of them. Say you have two machines with the Active-Active extension, and you have to restart one because of operating system updates. The other machine can completely take over.

The interesting thing is that this is done based on the transaction level of your processing. While operating system-based mirroring or database or storage-based mirroring are always done on a purely technical level, with the SEEBURGER Active-Active, a transaction coming in will be registered initially on all nodes. If one node goes down while your file or data is being processed, the other side can make use of the data and continue processing. This way, you can have up to almost 100 percent uptime.

You can even do SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) updates. You can take one site offline, do a service pack update, hotfixes, or configuration changes, and that newer version with the new service pack will be compatible to continue processing with the other node. You can bring it up, wait until processing is distributed to both sides again, and do the service pack update on the other side. You can ensure that you have zero downtime.

I would say the scalability is unlimited because you can add additional nodes in an unlimited way. You have several topics where you can make use of the scalability of the solution. You might have multiple nodes where you are distributing the same activity to multiple computers or VM guest systems. That way, you increase the power of the whole system.

You can even split instances. For example, I want to split user activities done over the front end or user portal, like using an API catalog, from the processing activities, such as translating a file or communicating a file to SAP or to an external partner. That enables me to increase the power for the processing when I do not need additional power for the users. There are multiple modules, the process engine, Adapter Engine, and DataStore, and you can distribute them to several machines and increase them in an unlimited way. What we've heard a few years ago is, that SEEBURGER has tested with 250 instances, meaning there were 250 computers working as one or system, and that might not be the latest test.

We have 300 to 350 people working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but from different areas. We have end-users using it for business monitoring checking the messages exchanged with their partners. It could be a sales person who wants to see which messages have been sent by his customer. We also have developers on the platform developing APIs, as well as the people developing mappings for the B2B activities. There are also administrators, who are mainly part of the department I'm working in. We enable people to make use of integration capabilities. The user interface has been improved drastically over the last few years, and that means they do not always have to ask us, "Can you do this for me?" or "Can you search that for me?" We give them an account and then they can go in and gather the information on their own.

In terms of future-proofing our business, we see that SEEBURGER is fast enough that even our architects receive a satisfying answer. Whenever we ask about, for example, "Can you deal with Docker containers?" or "Can you do API management?" or "Can you do data ingestion for data lake? they have a solution ready. We know that SEEBURGER has invested a lot of effort into research and development. It is not only that they follow what the customers are doing and requesting, but they even prepare for the future. That's interesting for us, because for some topics I was not even aware that SEEBURGER is dealing with that, like Docker or Kubernetes.

If SEEBURGER sees something that is required, things which are not necessarily related to integration, like running a system on a Docker container, or Active-Active, SEEBURGER provides such options to make the customer happy and to ensure that their product is running properly. They make sure they can handle future demands. They do everything to ensure that they are ready for the future.

Even in regard to security, for example, we see that they avoid having security issues or running into issues with outdated software because, with the service packs, they always prepare for future software for new Java versions, or to be ready for new operating systems or new database versions. They always have a roadmap to ensure that there's nothing we can complain about.

We have a 24/7 maintenance and support contract with SEEBURGER, which includes software updates as well as technical support. They take care of the documentation that describes what our company is doing with SEEBURGER and that it is always up to date. Even if the named supporters assigned to our account are not there because I call support on the weekend or at night, another support contact is able to quickly check what our landscape looks and what we are doing.

Their support activities are very precise. A tool they've integrated in their Landscape Manager allows us to automatically provide all that required data to SEEBURGER in one shot. The Landscape Manager acts without any database and without any interdependency with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself. So even if our BIS system has issues, they can do an analysis immediately. The Landscape Manager, with the option to create a support case, is collecting all that information and provides it in the required format to SEEBURGER. Usually, within a short time frame, you have a qualified answer about what is wrong. The knowledge and experience of all their support staff have increased drastically over the last years. Even if there is an issue at night, the chance is nearly 100 percent that a support person can help us immediately.

When we started with SEEBURGER, we used a version called SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Version 5. The setup for that was a little bit complicated. 

With the newer versions, like 6.7, it is easy because they guide you with a lot of wizards and good documentation. If you do a setup now, you can use the BIS Landscape Manager, which is a tool with which you can control your complete landscape. You might have several components inside such a BIS environment. You might add another server, for example, to handle demand. The Landscape Manager is a tool that gives you a full overview of your landscape. From there, you can set up new components. If you book something in addition, you can add it from there. You can do service pack updates. You can install hotfixes from there and all potential third-party components you might need. For example, you can install components to connect between SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and SAP. You can even handle licensing topics over the Landscape Manager. This was a significant improvement, over the years, because it helps us to fully automate even the basic administration, when we are not thinking about interfaces concretely.

We started at a point, 20 years ago, when some of the mechanisms were not there. Now, when you start with SEEBURGER, if you have a clear idea about what you want to do, the initial setup could be done within less than one hour, because of their guided approach. That includes installing the system base with all its components and even deploying a standard solution which provides a lot of integration functionality on more of an abstract level. That way, you do not have to deal with technical details. You just input whatever is required to run your interface, but you do not have to deal with any technical topics.

In general, we have seen ROI, because we have done a lot of consolidation over the last few years and avoided the need for other solutions by using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as our central integration platform. Over the years, we've migrated around 40 to 45 decentralized integration solutions and saved a lot of money and reduced complexity. We have even improved the services we can provide to our partners because they do not necessarily have to deal in a different way in different regions. They always have the choice based on same service offering in each region where OSRAM is active.

They have options for every budget. You can book Cloud Services, starting with a few hundred Euros, depending on what you want, or you can even purchase huge landscapes and operate them on your own or any deployment or operating model in between. The pricing is fair compared to others.

Around one and a half years ago, we evaluated other solutions around the time we introduced the API management within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We recognized that SEEBURGER is the only one which provides such a wide spectrum of functionality, all from one vendor, without adding modules from a third party. All the others we've had an eye on say, "Yeah, we can add this or you can download that plug-in from this company." This is not the case with SEEBURGER. You can have all these components from one vendor, which helps avoid running into trouble because of a vendor saying, "I'm not responsible." That is the biggest strength of SEEBURGER, beside their strong interest in OSRAM. 

They've really spent a lot of time giving us all the answers to all the topics we've been interested in. Once we introduced the API management, even the SEEBURGER CTO spent time aligning with us on what the API management roadmap looks like at SEEBURGER, to ensure that my management could support the decision, together with me, to use SEEBURGER for API management. We introduced it and we are happy with it. We see that what SEEBURGER promised us is now available in the current versions.

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.

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

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

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

I like that you can search documents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are an automotive parts supplier and we exchange purchase orders, releases, shipment forecasts, as well as ASNs—shipment notifications, one of the most important documents—invoices, and some non-EDI files. We support North America and South America, but we have colleagues in Europe and Asia as well. We are communicating with most of the automotive companies: Ford, Volvo, Magna, Chrysler and we use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for transactions in the automotive field.

We also use the translator, BIC 6 Converter, and most of the protocols for communication: AS2, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, OFTP, FTPS. We also communicate with some banks.

We have been able to automate processes using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). For example, we have a lot of scheduled tasks or jobs that automatically pull information from other FTP servers, according to a schedule. These automatic flows or processes have reduced costs in a lot of environments, for sure. There are fewer people needed for a specific process in the plant. Also, the timing and accuracy of the information have improved which also helps reduce costs.

It has also helped enable digital business processes in our organization. A lot of processes are now in our BIC 6 system, which helps to improve operations in our plants.

In addition, we only have 30 minutes to send ASNs to a partner, and if this is not achieved we can be subject to fees or lose points in programs, which is not good for the plants. We accomplish this with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Similarly, payments and invoices are sent using the BIC 6 application and the time it takes to receive payments has been decreased.

All of its features are needed for our business and the EDI we have with all our partners. Among the most important are the 

• BIC 6 Converter 
• communication protocols, which have the newer security features for certificates and encryption
• communication with SAP, which is our core system 
• SEEBURGER BIC 6 front end.

In addition, the B2B portal is a good improvement, a good solution.

It's really the complete system that is the most valuable for us.

There are a lot of service packs during the year. I know that part is the process for updating features, but sometimes it's difficult to update service packs every month.

In my current company I have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for four years, and I used it in another company for five years.

It's very stable. We have not had too many issues with the stability of the system. During the year there may be one or two out outages, but in the last year we haven't had any big issues.

Our company is always growing, so we will need a more robust system and, eventually, we will have to go to the cloud. We are very close to having to grow our SAP system. SAP will definitely go to the cloud at some point, so we will need to grow our system, hardware, and architecture in our data center, and BIC 6 for sure.

The scalability is good.

The support is good. 

There is an issue in that sometimes I try to send all the information in my first email, such as the logs and system information, but the ticket that results is different, and support asks for information that we already sent in the first email. I don't know what helpdesk or system they use, but that delays support a little bit. Since I am in Mexico, I end up waiting for another seven or 10 hours to get an answer in which they ask me for something that I already sent. It's not a big deal, but it's an opportunity for improvement.

We had an issue with a certificate with one of our trading partners on a Saturday. We called SEEBURGER support. It was a little difficult because they needed to contact a developer who was not available. But the next day the issue was fixed, and we got the support.

Also, because sometimes there is a delay in the number of service packs we have, when support is needed, the answer is always, "You need to update your version of the service pack." So a reduction in the number of service packs during the year would help. I think 6.7 and the cloud have something along these lines, but for customers like us who are on-premise, the service pack upgrades are difficult.

But as a company, they are always in touch with us and trying to give us what we need. That is the most important thing. They want to see what our needs are and what our current situation is.

We did not have a previous EDI solution.

The setup is not complex. Sometimes what can make it complex is the number of flows or the amount of information. But in terms of the application itself, it's not complex.

The solution is deployed very quickly, even in minutes. The complicated part is testing all the flows with the new solution. That part can take months. For the last upgrade, it took about five months because we had to test all scenarios and business cases. When we found issues we had to report them to SEEBURGER. They had to fix them and we had to install the solution and test it again.

For upgrades, here in Mexico, there are two people from our company who are involved. In Europe there are another four or five more. The same teams manage it on a daily basis. We have developers, people on the communication teams, and business analysts using it. Overall, there are about 10 people using it in North America, and in Europe there are another 10.

It provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow. The flexibility there is good.

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.

We use it for any interface between two of our business applications, as well as any B2B communication that needs transferring of files, where a big part includes EDI. For any communication or documentation going from one company to another and also needing to do updates with the files, we are able to use SEEBURGER BIS. It is not just transferring the file, but making changes and doing some types of differentiation filtering. We can look up or find the information from other databases and put them together, then send the final document. We use it as a business integration tool.

It's used 24/7/365. Every minute of downtime counts because our actual work depends on SEEBURGER BIS's performance. So far, it has been working fine for us.

SEEBURGER BIS is processing about two million documents annually offering data transfer, big data (like integration from other databases), workflow process and data converting, and providing data file confidentiality, because it's compressed and logged. 

Many processes are automated because of SEEBURGER BIS. Imagine how many resources used to be needed to follow up with email and faxes instead of SEEBURGER BIS automatically receiving and sending updates to our ERP. It is there already instead of someone receiving the fax or email, then manually entering it into our ERP system.

SEEBURGER BIS can reconcile documentation, like our accounts payable and statements within the system. If you are manually doing it, then it is really time consuming with a lot of errors. Whereas, SEEBURGER BIS allows for a lot of basic level programming within the documentation, filtering, and sorting out VLOOKUP. It lets us get two database tables from two different systems, then merge them based on the logic that we provide. So, it is a very helpful product. 

The solution has tremendously helped enable digital business transformation in our organization. It's the digital way to go. It turns everything to digital, like receiving faxes. It also cuts down on email.

The solution provides real-time data insights for our organization. It's helping us be more proactive and preorganize our production when it comes to our ingredients or anything that we need to plan to purchase. 

We still have room for improvement, but it's not because the system cannot do it or is lacking. The issue is our resources working with businesses to find wherever we can automate business processes. For example, we have started to contact our business leads in each department, work with them, and find out if they do any manual work which SEEBURGER BIS can do. Whenever we find an opportunity, we start working with the business to make it happen. So, we have reduced our manual work, but it's ongoing process. 

It is automated and paperless. It has enabled all our activities when it comes to EDI documentation, as it's a big part of the process.

Our team, who works directly with the system, are very happy with it, along with the configuration, stability, and support we get from SEEBURGER. It is simple to use. If you understand the product, it's pretty user-friendly.

We use Message Tracking, which is a very good feature. Message Tracking has about 300 to 400 business people who can find documents and ask the integration team about them. For example, they're looking for a document that the vendor or trading partner tells them that they sent, but they don't see it in the ERP system yet. So, they go to SEEBURGER Message Tracking, which can tell them if we received it already from the outside and what happened, e.g., if it went to SEEBURGER BIS or if it's already in the ERP system. It's a very simple tool to use. They also can use that tool to see the source document. 

They have room to grow with the newest technologies.

We are a little locked in with understanding the errors that we receive. We are working with their support to prevent these issues when they come into the database. We use a SQL database and believe they can do better when it comes working with large databases. We have had few instances where the system is hanging, which are most likely from the database. We are working with their support to find out the problem and fix their system. We have tried to use their notification system to prevent these issues, but they need to improve their monitoring system.

We have been using SEEBURGER BIS for more than 10 years.

Comparing it to other systems that we have seen and had interactions with, this is most scalable system in terms of integration. It has many functions which are not possible to do from other systems. We are happy with the scalability.

We are using this system globally at about 40 to 50 locations. We are collecting the coverage data of hundreds of trading partners. It's incredible. If we had been doing this manually, I am not sure we could have survived.

When it comes to people who use SEEBURGER BIS from a development perspective, we have a few, but not many.

We are happy with the support. They have different levels of support. However, we use their standard support, which works, even though we are a 24/7 operation.  

Unfortunately, we don't have a team assigned to us, so we're using the general support level. If we want personal or special support, then it is chargeable.

From an account management perspective, SEEBURGER BIS could be improved.

Without SEEBURGER BIS, there would be a lot of manual work and we would need something else. 10 years before, we had different companies working under this one umbrella, and they have different types of systems doing EDI, etc., then we found SEEBURGER BIS. When we merged together, we merged everything to SEEBURGER BIS, which handles 70 to 75 percent of our invoices going back and forth to our vendors for receiving our orders and purchases. We have completely cut the traditional ways of emailing each other or faxing. That's the old way. SEEBURGER BIS is the way to go.

When we're upgrading patches, it's straightforward. Although, updating to 6.5 from our previous version (6.2) was a little challenging. We needed to create a big project to move the consulting services. The planning took a few months and we still have a few hiccups after the upgrade. We have had upgrades that were easier, but going to 6.5, it took a little effort.

We have only a specific window for maintenance, which is monthly. That was agreed upon from the start of the year with our businesses. Therefore, we like to have the maintenance hours controlled by us versus the providers. That is one of the reasons that we are not considering the cloud yet.

The deployment was not difficult. It's user-friendly, and once it's configured, it runs fine. For each vendor, it's a manual process because there is no other way to go. However, you just need the time to put it altogether. They have tools and default maps which are helpful. It took probably three to four months to complete everything and merge everything together. For our last upgrade, the planning and implementing of the upgrade on our development system plus the testing with finding issues and fixing them, then upgrading it to production, took three months altogether.

Because it is a client-installed application, we installed the updates on top of the existing ones.

We work with business partners for the communication product goals. 

If any of our partners have AS2 capabilities, we just go and connect them directly. There is no third-party between our ERP Solution and SEEBURGER BIS. It works seamlessly, and we need any third-party applications.

SEEBURGER BIS increased our efficiency by at least 30 percent.

The investment is the integration with our trading partners. The business processes that go on internally and intercompany, like warehouse transfers and stock control, are a good investment for us.

Price and licensing are comparable to other systems. It's well-priced and simple. It's not user-based or anything. It's just per seat, per system. So, it's pretty straight forward. Because it's per system, one system is enough. However, if you want to make it larger, then you can grow with it. 

SEEBURGER BIS pretty much does whatever we need for our integration, and we are happy. We don't know a better system to evaluate. 

To survive in this world, I think SEEBURGER BIS is one of the tools that you will need to have. Comparable to other tools, we found it's much better.

Our ERP system has also an integration module, but compared to SEEBURGER BIS, it's much smaller. So, if anything new comes, we deploy SEEBURGER BIS instead of the ERP solution.

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.

My primary use case for this solution is for transferring EDI documents between customers and suppliers of the heavy truck industry.

Beforehand, we would hand-deliver via email over 100 to 200 reports a day. Then we automated that through SEEBURGER in less than two weeks.

We are going to upgrade to the new 6.7 and the API module because of the updated user interface and the additional technologies for blockchains. The API module is the most compelling reason to switch. 

It has enabled digital business processes. It's the connection between our ERP system and the rest of the company. We were able to automate processing invoices digitally like an inbound invoice and FastPay payments.

We generally use the EDI suite the most, we use the entire suite.

Beyond the regular functionality of the front end, the most valuable to us is that it's completely open to do whatever we want to do. I can dynamically select to move a file to somewhere on our networker, another joining network, or send it via EDI, archive, or put it into a database. We can make the decision path once from a deciding point. The ability to dynamically build BPEL workflows is what we see as the most useful feature.

It helps us to automate our processes. We receive an inbound EDI file and from that one single file receipt or workflow kickoff, we're able to generate reports for our customer service group or our shipping group. We can then populate our ERP system and populate our Tableau visual dashboards as well. So we take that one process and are able to kick off multiple workflows.

This automation has helped to reduce costs. For example, we don't need a full-time person sending reports anymore. 

Automation also helps to increase efficiency. That position was spending 20 to 25% of their time manually sending reports.

It also provides real-time data insights. We're able to immediately locate when files are missing and populate Tableau so that we can see other things visually.

API connectivity needs improvement as well as the GUI. The GUI hasn't changed that much in 10 years, but of course, that's already been updated. I would say I'm excited about the screenshots but that's about it.

I have been using SEEBURGER BIS for ten years and four months. 

Besides for mistakes of our own, we've never had downtime from Seeburger's process.

On-premise isn't that scalable. For the design of it, I know 6.7 fixes that, but the cloud versions are very scalable. We prefer on-premise though.

We have four technicians. I am the manager, I have a coordinator, an analyst, and a part-time analyst.

We generally take turns on who's going to deploy it over the weekend between the four of us. Of course, we work to network our resources, to take snapshots of different things, just in case we need to roll back.

SEEBURGER is our connection with SAP to the rest of our system. So it is one of our critical systems, it's number two after SAP. We absolutely have plans to increase usage. With the upgrade in API, we would lean a lot heavier into our implementation with our customers outside of EDI, once we have that in place and working.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. 

Sometimes they are very fast to respond to things that aren't important, such as if I just need some easy things. If I need a new document standard, I get instant responses. But if we have a critical issue, which doesn't happen often, sometimes I feel like they respond a little slower. That could be because they're doing research, maybe the visibility of them starting the work isn't there. But I get responses back when we have an issue or a question faster than when I just need new documents standards. Maybe it's just when the ticket's assigned it's not visible to us that the work has started. If I ask for something simple, it's almost instantaneous. I'd like to know that people are working. If that is the issue, there's just no visibility.

I was involved with upgrading from five to six. They are completely different technology sets. It was as straightforward as it could be moving from one full technology to a different one. They had very well defined paths for converting our mapping procedures, but we had to rebuild all the entities from the ground up. There wasn't an option to import those or an explanation of why the technologies don't work together. It makes total sense why they moved from five to six. So I would say that it was as straightforward as it could be.

The migration took four to six months. 

We had 90 days to convert all our maps and then the next 90 days or so spent building our entities and testing. Then we went live when we had two-day downtime. Transfering the databases was a lengthy procedure of about 20 hours. We had to have a two-day downtime but we did that over the holiday weekend. So we did the same thing: module import, building new entities, testing QA, approval, and then the implementation go-ahead.

We had one consultant here for a week onsite and he provided over 50 to 60 hours of support over that six month period, it wasn't that long though.

The consultant was fantastic. He was very good about teaching us the system. We're huge on learning and then doing the work ourselves, so we can always support ourselves later. And he was very willing to work with us on that rather than he just doing the work himself.

We have absolutely seen ROI in terms of processing orders from customers. The automation of processes is the best way to describe our return.

I know that we have a sweetheart deal. It is a little more expensive than Sterling. They have more control than they do with SI, I do a lot of contract work with Sterling. If you are looking at very standard workflow processes, you can go a little cheaper. But if you want something where you can completely design the system and offer a lot more automation, SEEBURGER is the way to go.

SEEBURGER provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow especially with their new cloud offerings. That wasn't part of our process since we are on-premise. We are already pretty large, so there's not another room for us to go down and start up again.

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. 

SEEBURGER BIS monitors our system servers, i.e., the internal and external communications. It monitors that everything works fine. When I need to configure new trading partners, they take care of the customer map. They already have an existing catalog of customers, and I work with them to build a process map. On their end, they build the map for the customer using specific coding, then we do the same in SAP. This is what they monitor. 

It is in the cloud, but hosted by SEEBURGER. They maintain the process via Message Tracking and other applications.

We had a problem. One of our biggest customers in North America, Home Depot, was sending us reports of issues with quantities and pricing. These reports were loaded into SAP, but the business people were not looking at them because SAP is cumbersome and complicated. I raised the situation with my contact at SEEBURGER, and we worked on another type of report. We developed a parallel process, which was their idea, and they provided a new report called Jasper. It converts the transaction into a human readable report and is a parallel process. We send these reports via email to the business people, who do pay attention to them now because they can see the information. They can also react much faster to customer requests.

SEEBURGER BIS is excellent for customer mapping.

SEEBURGER BIS helps us automate processes. When something is manual and we have to fix the data, then it is really complicated. However, when it's automated, we trust it and the process in the system, so we don't have to go back and fix it. For example, we had a problem with a partner sending 17 files every week, but a few times a year, they wouldn't send files during a certain window. We would escalate this with them. Then, when they caught up and sent the files again, they weren't authenticated. We had to fix this situation before it became a nightmare because our financials were impacted. Also, it was really messy. So, I worked with SEEBURGER to have something automated to pick up the files within a certain window and validate them as accurate. If the files come outside of this window, then we have to approve the loading of them.

They are audit compliant. They did their own audit and shared it with me, which was useful. If we need a list of users' accesses, then I can make the request of them. I haven't done an audit of SEEBURGER, but when they do provide me their own reports, that is good enough.

On the technical side, their process is excellent. When we set up a transaction with them, they have a customer map, so we know for sure that we won't have problems. Once it's installed in production, we don't have to go back and change it again. I really love that. If we started supporting the system ourselves, I'm not sure that we would have the same quality of work.

SEEBURGER BIS provides us everything in a unified platform without needing third-party solutions. They are very flexible, providing us things like API solutions. The API will change the industry for EDI. Our other departments already use API, but for us working EDI, this is something new and SEEBURGER is pushing us this information.

The integration is not so excellent. While I'm not saying there is a problem, there is no pattern. When we start a new project, we have to work with new people and processes every time. The technical side of their system is very good, but their change process is not repeatable. It needs to be rebuilt each time.

I have been using the solution for eight years, since 2012.

It has been used in my organization for about 12 years.

The stability is perfect. I sleep well.

The scalability is pretty solid.

I plan to keep working with SEEBURGER as long as I can. When we have an integration, they are there to answer questions and work with us. I don't see any problems if we ever need to increase.

There are approximately 15 business users who connect to the SEEBURGER BIS portal to view transactions. 

The few times that I have had a problem with employees, I escalated the situation and we tried to improve it. When it did not work, they changed the person. 

With the expertise that they developed, they can answer our needs and understand when we have a problem. That is why I feel like when I ask a question, if they don't know, then there is always someone who does know. They have very good expertise.

They have been very reactive to my requests. I wish that they were more proactive when answering though. Maybe they have too many customers?

The initial setup is complex, but for good reason. Of course, I would like to have a simplified process and a customer map that really matches my needs as well as follow their central global team. We have to work with them. That leads to delays and we cannot ask for any changes. It is complex and tedious, but I understand that it is for the good. On the flip side, they are very reliable on the technical end because it's complex at the beginning and they can solve most of the issues.

The deployment time depends on the size of the project. For a simple project, it could take a month to deploy.

At this point, we let SEEBURGER make the decision on upgrades. We don't decide which version we're using, because they support the system. What we're planning to do, because of COVID-19 and internal priorities, is go to iPaaS.

I have a team of two analysts. On their side, I have two points of contact: One person who works on the day-to-day and process side of things and another person who works on the maps.

SEEBURGER installed the latest version.

It saves time by doing things automatically.

I had a problem at one time with their invoicing. I told them, then we worked on the process and improved it. 

They installed the connection between SAP and SEEBURGER BIS in Europe first. This was awhile ago. When I came along, I became involved in the project and started working with them. Every time that I made a request, the work was done well, but I was not receiving my invoices. I knew I had to pay for the work and was trying to find someone to send me the invoices or a report of what was being done. From that end, it was really not working. After a few years, I was complaining and not happy. At the end of the year, they would come with a long list of invoices to pay, which was really bad. So, I asked for a change. We worked on the process, and since five years ago, I have worked with SEEBURGER based in North America. 

Now, when I have a question, I know who to contact. They send me a report with invoices every month. They really reacted to my concern, and we improved the process. Since then, I have had no problem. 

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.

We are a third-party logistics company. We work for a lot of people. We've got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) because we needed an SFTP server over 10 years ago. We have a lot of customers at various levels of IT maturity. Originally it all started off with just FTP, but we now use AS2 and SFTP an awful lot, and we're now moving into the API world.

There are some common interfaces here and there but, generally, it's all bespoke to each customer, of which we have about 75 to 80 and that's changing every month. We run in the realm of 800,000 processes a week. There is about a 50-50 split between internal systems talking to it and external customers sending files in.

The solution is on-premise.

We now have everything on a single system, which is nice. We got rid of a lot of the legacy, although we now have a legacy SEEBURGER system.

The solution's capabilities in fulfilling our existing B2B integration requirements are brilliant. Among our multiple customers we connect to SAP systems, JDE, all the various ERPs that you can possibly get, Oracle procurement systems, etc. We haven't come across anything yet — and customers are trying to trip us up — that we can't do.

Using the solution, we've created our own processes such that we have our own building blocks. That has made it a lot quicker to deploy interfaces. I would estimate our efficiency has increased by 50 percent as a result.

I don't know if the solution has saved us money, but it has given greater capabilities and therefore we can make more money because we are able to connect to different customers' systems.

Its flexibility is the most valuable feature. We can hook up using any protocol that's out there, to anybody. We've got a good in-house team that can work out with all the parts of it, including transformations for the bespoke processes that we sometimes need.

We're not using half of its capabilities at the moment so haven't hit the edges of it yet. We're not particularly leading edge, nor are most of our customers.

There are some aspects of the front-end GUI, the actual queries that you use, that could be improved. They're all very minor to be honest. It's quite a nice modular system. It fits together quite well. The changes would be to the usability of the system at the front-end. It's not the underlying processing function of the system. It's how we maintain things and being able to see what's going on.

We've been using the solution for about ten years.

The stability is generally pretty good. We used the first version we installed and we just left it, which is where this aspect of then not doing reviews of the current technical solution came in and tripped us up a couple of times.

The new version is very stable. We haven't had any issues at all. At one point our database disappeared for ten minutes and it didn't notice. The system stayed up, which was rather nice. It didn't cause any major outage, which it should have done. It's a well-thought-out and implemented system, from what we can see.

We have no issues with scalability at the moment. The old version was really creaking at the seams when we eventually migrated everything, or most things, off it of it. That was a bit touch and go for a couple of months. The new one has not got any issues at all.

The usage is increasing all the time. It is the integration tool within this company. It's a central part of all the internal processes that we have. It's the glue that holds the company together as such, in a lot of cases. It is being invested in quite heavily.

Their technical support is okay. It doesn't blow you away. They will come back with an answer. It won't be the answer you would like, generally. For the first seven years, and since we got 6.3.2 in, the answer was always, "You need to upgrade." That was kind of annoying, but to be expected I suppose.

We've been landed with a consultant from SEEBURGER who doesn't know the system inside and out, which is a little bit frustrating sometimes. Other than that, they generally come back with answers to queries reasonably quickly and accurately.

We were previously using Mercator as the transformation tool, but it was very old at the time and needed replacing as it was unable to provide SFTP.

The setup is getting a lot smoother. It's reasonably easy in the latest versions. Our previous system was generally Unix. We're now on to virtually a wholly Windows setup, which brings different sorts of problems. I'm actually quite impressed with the way that the SEEBURGER team is able to put out patches. It's very smooth, which is quite refreshing.

It took about four or five months from starting the build to actually getting off of customer migration.

We are currently migrating from 6.32 to 6.52. The initial migration was reasonably good, but we have an awful lot of customers — individual companies that we connect to — and some of them are pretty difficult to get off the old system. We're getting close to the end. There are some IT departments among our customers where they will put the initial product in for connecting to us and then everybody leaves and there will promptly be a problem. But we'll get there. We do have a plan to move to 6.7 fairly soon but we need to get rid of the old one first.

We haven't found that many differences between 6.32 and 6.52 — the two versions that we use. We have had to change some of the transformation codes to fit in.

For our migration, the strategy was basically to build a brand-new system, which is what we had to do anyway. There was no getting away from that. With our current system, we may well do an in-place upgrade from 6.52 to 6.7. We just have to add a few servers and then we're good to go.

If we were going to jump a major version, which effectively would be an upgrade, then we would get a SEEBURGER guy in. One thing we have found over the years is that we probably do need to keep in contact with their consultants a bit more, checking with them occasionally just to make sure that we're not doing something that has been discovered as being not the ideal solution. We've been tripped up a couple of times with that. That's just something we've learned.

We had a consultant in this year to be able to install some new aspects of the system. We will probably get them in next year to go through a review of the system to make sure that we are currently doing everything as they would recommend. They do seem to change their recommendations but don't actually get in touch with us about them sometimes.

We're having to manage them, or certainly will, going forward.

On an annual basis, our support costs, which are based on the licensing, are about £120,000.

As you increase the size of your system, the per-CPU usage goes up. You're licensed for CPU and any modules that you may require, such as API management. The maintenance cost, going forward, is 20 percent.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees, other than consultancy, which is usually required to install a new aspect of the system.

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.