SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

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.

On-premises

We use the solution to tap and transform traffic. 

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

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

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

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is scalable. 

The tool's installation was easy. 

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

On-premises

We primarily use it for standard EDI practice forecasts, firms, ASNs, invoices, etc. We use everything here, including VDA, EDIFACT, and ANSI, but we are also now having our customers send us drawing files, and then we're sending them off to our engineers.

Our business has grown to have 14 major customers, which implies orders of greater than 200 parts per customer. If we include ship-to then we're probably talking closer to 50 new customers that have moved to EDI. I don't think we would have made it through the pandemic, to be honest, without this.

I have a tiny team in Spain that was entering every one of those requirements manually until we switched over to SEEBURGER, and then we could get them added pretty quickly. Now, for the first time in our history, we are adding Asian customers. Branches in India and China are starting to get EDI started, which has never happened before.

BIS provides me with everything in a unified platform and I haven't needed to add any third-party solutions. 

This product helps us to automate processes. Previously, we would have normally manually entered requirements and now, we just let it read them in automatically. As an example, just one customer with a 200 part requirement that goes out over 12 months would normally have taken my team two hours per week, just to enter the requirements. Now, it just happens and there is no work required at all from the team. In this regard, it has absolutely helped us to increase efficiency. 

At this point, automation hasn't led us to reduce the number of employees that we have. As such, I don't think that we've decreased any of our costs. 

SEEBURGER has helped us to enable digital business transformation. Every time we add a new customer, there is a digital footprint. This is no longer a manual process.

The fact that BIS is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment is very important because it means that we could take from one to the other. That is amazing.

The product somewhat helps to future-proof our business. I can add new adapters, for example. We're strictly on EDI and I know that they have more offerings than that, but we have not moved past it yet. Certainly, they are not stopping with EDI, which is good.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to make changes on-premises, without having to contact SEEBURGER. It allowed me to work on my timeframes, which is important because if I didn't hear back from a customer then it wasn't wasting SEEBURGER's time. I'm able to work more independently. 

The cost models have room for improvement. There are different licensing models between Europe and the USA, which is something that I don't understand. This is an aspect that needs to be improved.

Java is very old technology and they should move away from it, to anything that's better.

We have been using SEEBURGER since July 1st, 2017, four years ago.

With our on-premises implementation, we never had any issues with uptime or stability.

Scalability-wise, I don't know of any limits for us, so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

At this point, we only have two users, although we need to enlarge that role. I am responsible for the customer setup, connection setup, and map design. My other colleague also does customer setup and communication setup, but no map design.

We plan on expanding our usage because we're going to start moving our Asian colleagues. As soon as we find a customer that's able to do EDI with them, we will turn it on. We're certainly increasing in that world.

We now approach every customer and look for EDI opportunities. Now that we've determined that we can handle receiving CAD-type drawings through it, we are going to send that to different plants. We certainly plan on using it more, and I know due to COVID, we've never experienced the number of customers asking us for EDIs as we are now.

With respect to support, it's best-of-breed for me. I still get to work with my American counterparts at SEEBURGER, but my contract is in Europe. When I do need true support, I tend to get most of it from America, so that works in my time zone. Alternatively, when I use the service desk, it's support from the European side.

I like working with the SEEBURGER support. The service desk itself now has a chat, and that has saved me days because they answer the question right when I was on the phone with them, or on chat. That's been amazing. The service desk is always helpful. I'd say 95% of the time, I only have to use the service desk, which is included in our maintenance.

With my support in America, I have one particular person that the emails go to. Unless it's a big issue, he usually has an answer back out to me that day, so costing me far less than if it had to go to other areas. It's been a dream.

Everywhere in the world used something different before SEEBURGER.

In our American offices, we used TrustedLink, whereas, in Canada, we used Atos. In Europe, they used other packages. In Spain, for example, they used their own desktop version for EDI integration. We have also used SAP PI and others.

I don't know why we switched to the current solutions but it was done in conjunction with our SAP rollout.

In this IT world, it would be classified as quite straightforward.

In America in 2017, we started with a cloud-based deployment. Since then, we have migrated everything to an on-premises server in Europe. At the time, we went with a single point of communication, so we were only using OFTP2 when we started. It was a single server install. 

When it comes to our mappings, we've gotten very complex, especially because we merged the two. It is relevant to note that we have a two-stage implementation. At first, when it was just for Germany, I don't know that it was classified as very complex. When it was just for the USA, it was not classified as very complex. But when you blended the two, we added a lot more complexity to our world. Every process is broken down as "Is this a US EDI or is this European EDI?"

Effectively, we doubled our complexity at that point.

I don't know the original German timeframe but for the US implementation, it took a little more than two months to deploy.

For our first implementation, we asked SEEBURGER to do all of the work for us. I gave them all of my sample files, and all of my specs, and they took care of all of it for me. I concentrated on inbound first and then outbound, as per normal. After that, I would check the flow-through to see that the data went where I expected it to.

In that implementation, they did 75% of the work, and I only did 25% because I was rolling out SAP. I was in charge of two plants at the time, so I couldn't do EDI all by myself. All of the departments were rolled out and they did all of it for us. The support was perfect and it was exactly what I needed.

In 2018 or 2019, we moved back to an on-premises deployment. At that point, they were able to assign the connection guy to us and then one person for the maps. He took care of double-checking and finding a way to merge the current on-premises and our former cloud processes together for us.

At that point, I was able to assist a lot more because I could concentrate on the EDI, and I also had a colleague in Germany that could work with me. That time, it was more a 50/50 process, with us helping to deploy it. We started on January 1st, and we went live with that merge on April 1st. It was a little bit longer of an implementation move but we weren't as desperate for a start date. Overall, we had no issues moving from the cloud back to on-premises.

The US SEEBURGER staff were fantastic with the second one. When we found out that our implementation was not going to work on the German one, because somebody forgot to sign us up on our side, the American people stepped in. They were able to get me up and running with about two months of prep, and then a bit more because I needed them to help me more than they should have had to help me for the summer that year.

It is unheard of to get that many customers up and running as fast as they did for us.

I will be in charge of maintenance when it's time, but I will steal somebody from my operations IT team to assist me with that. Other than making new maps, to this point, there has been no real maintenance that we've been doing.

We do not have exact figures for ROI at the moment but the one example, where we take two hours per week down to zero, is priceless right now.

I wasn't involved in the contract negotiations, but I can say that we pay per site. It is based on the expected usage per month. I would like to find a way to change this and not pay per site because I don't want to pay for a site that has one EDI turned on, and pay the same amount for them.

We pay for a maximum number of setups, then we pay per customer map, and we pay maintenance on each one of those. BIS provides the flexibility to pay as you grow. The price of each customer map is €200 and the hourly rate for maintenance is fairly reasonable.

We budgeted for ten days of maintenance at €160 per hour, for a total of €12,000. We purchased the block so that we wouldn't have to pause our operations but we hardly use it. That contract started in 2019 and we've barely made a dent in it.

I highly recommend that people negotiate strong and hard on their customer map contract. I've decreased our European one in half, and I still will fight to get it down again. I prefer the pricing model out of the USA by far. There is a significant difference between these two pricing models, which is something that I don't understand.

As part of our monitoring, we run checks to see if we're close to where we expect to stay in terms of usage.

In addition, you have to buy each adaptor that you're going to use. These include OFTP2, AS2, SFTP, and others. I highly recommend that you figure out your market and pick the best one for your marketplace, instead of paying for all of them.

We did evaluate other options in 2015, although I can't recall the names of the products.

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.

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.

Public Cloud

Other

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.

On-premises

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. 

On-premises

We use it to connect via EDI with our trading partners within the EU region and with other regions, including, America.

It's an off-premise solution. We have a secure file transfer server where we are placing the files or picking up the EDI, and then they connect and put the files in or take them away. On the SEEBURGER side, we then connect into their portal so we can then see the information about the message flows, etc.

We don't yet have any examples of how it's improved the way our organization functions because, so far in our deployment, we've just migrated over what we have, as is. We've moved all of the existing connections with our trading partners and messages across from OpenText. In the next financial year, starting next month, we'll start looking at onboarding new trading partners and really making use of the standardized messaging that we have with them, for converting to the other trading partners' formats.

What I can say is that it has met all of our requirements, to date. We are in the process, in the next couple of years, of migrating to SAP, and they have two or three different mechanisms for natively integrating with SAP. But because we're not there yet, we haven't made use of that. Currently, we are using a simple file transfer protocol mechanism, but it's fully meeting our B2B requirements.

We are looking to introduce some new message types this year, such as processing vendor invoices. That would include receiving the invoices via EDI, linking that to our ERP, and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) automatically doing the processing. So we're expecting to achieve some additional operational efficiencies.

If SEEBURGER plans to do something, they will meet their target. We haven't been disappointed by them at all. For example, we had six trading partners to onboard and they said, "We'll make it happen," and they did make it happen. They did exactly what they said they would do. That's a really positive thing.

I have also had a lot of good feedback from SEEBURGER and have really been kept up-to-date about the status. With some companies, a salesperson will say something but then the technical people don't deliver.

We get a monthly SLA report. We have SLA targets with them that were set in the contract, and they report against those. So far, there have been no breaches of SLA. You can also go onto their website and view real-time information so you can monitor the performance if needed. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) I've got really good visualization.

For the area that we've used them for so far, I don't really see any way that they can make it easier. I can't say enough about how they have delivered exactly what they said that they would, and for the cost and in the time that they said it would take. They're bang-on there.

We implemented in the last quarter of 2019, so we're coming up to around six months in terms of the live environment.

At the moment, there has not been a single problem. We haven't had any issues after going live; 100 percent uptime. They've met all of the SLAs. The message-processing time in the SLA is up to one hour; in reality, it's been about 10 seconds.

There have been no performance issues and no outages. And if they do have an outage, then they've got disaster recovery plans to mitigate.

Scalability was the whole reason we went with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Our hope is to add 20 to 40 trading partners a year. Because we've done the groundwork, we've done our initial messages, we don't need to do anything more from an integration point of view. Now it's SEEBURGER's job to connect their platform to our trading partners' platforms. That was the whole selling point.

Our entire organization is the intended beneficiary of our SEEBURGER deployment. At the moment, we've only actually got it linked into our Germany and U.K. offices, but we're expanding use in the coming months into our Italy office, for suppliers, customers, and e-invoicing.

I had to raise one ticket during the implementation, and I was using it as a test, really, to see how ticketing works. They were really good and responsive, and I was kept up to date.

The ticket was actually auto-raised by the system because a message had tried to come in, but they weren't able to process it. I then received a phone call because it could have been an urgent situation. It turned out the person's sender ID hadn't been set up correctly. It was my typo when I gave the information to SEEBURGER in the new system. But it was dealt with and resolved fantastically.

So far, I have had no issues with tech support. Nobody receives 10 out of 10 because there's always room to improve, but I would say their support rates a nine out of 10, although I can't say what they would improve.

We were already doing EDI previously and using OpenText as a communication platform, as a VAN (value added network). The problem with OpenText is that they'll pass through your messages and the dealings that we've had with them, but they don't really do the message conversions and the like. And we are looking to expand quite a lot in terms of trading partners in the coming years using EDI. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we can just send one message between us and SEEBURGER and they will do all of the hard work with the trading partners. Whereas previously, with OpenText, if each trading partner had a slightly different variant of EDI, we would have to make the adjustments ourselves.

Also, all of the EDI conversion into our ERP was actually done using a bolt-on to our ERP. Because we're moving to SAP at some point, that bolt-on was not compatible. But that is where I gained my experience, because I had to create the mappings between the EDI messages and our core internal procedures.

The move away from our old solution was about the scalability. Previously, I was spending a lot of time doing the mappings myself, as well as the onboarding and dealing with all of the headaches related to that. In addition, because we're moving to a system that doesn't have that EDI bolt-on, which is the SAP solution, we needed to find an alternative. Finally, because we wanted to rapidly increase the number of trading partners that we're connected with, we would have had to take on an additional resource. That's where the price-benefit came in.

For me, the setup was straightforward. We really planned the design out together, how it would work. We had a couple of meetings at our office. They came down to visit us, both the technical people and salespeople, to make sure that the technical people were able to deliver what the salespeople were promising. We had a planning workshop, and we said, "Okay, these are the types of messages," and we described exactly how they'd be coming into the FTP server, the kind of folder structure we had to create, the permissions, etc. Once the planning was done, we implemented according to plan, and it was fine.

We had a kickoff meeting, which involved members of SEEBURGER's sales team and their technical guys. Then, we had a second meeting with the technical guys, a meeting that was a bit more in-depth about how we were going to achieve what we wanted. We had to provide information like the trading partners' formats, the trading partners' mailbox settings, the types of messages we were using when interacting with those trading partners, etc. Then we decided the best method for communicating our messages to them. To establish that securely, we had to create a VPN tunnel directly to SEEBURGER's systems and get all that tested up. Each portion of the build was tested independently and then, as a whole, we did some end-to-end tests. It went really well.

From start to finish, the deployment took about a month. It went really quickly.

After the deployment was ready, we had some additional time with our trading partners to do some end-to-end testing before switching over to live. That way, our trading partners were happy. We only had about seven or eight trading partners that we were migrating across, but from SEEBURGER's side, they just made it happen.

On our side, it was just me, and it wasn't full-time. We did a couple of hours one day, a little bit of time another day. There was more time spent in the weekly progress updates than in actually doing things, from my side. I wasn't involved doing the work.

We worked directly with SEEBURGER. I have quite a lot of EDI experience so I understood quite a lot of it and that may have helped.

Compared to our previous solution, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is more expensive. But our previous solution isn't compatible with SAP so we would have had to migrate to a solution like SEEBURGER's at some point. It has cost us more money to migrate to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but in three to five years' time, we should start to reap the benefits.

We hope to start seeing ROI by the end of this year, once we start getting more trading partners onboarded. We're paying for a set monthly amount but we have only reached about 10 percent usage. Once we start approaching in the vicinity of 60 to 70 percent usage, then we should start getting an ROI. That's not SEEBURGER's fault, that's our fault, because we're not ready to be at that stage yet.

In terms of manpower, once we start to get some of these more automation processes in place, there could be a one or two headcount reduction in terms of the related tasks.

The only thing that would be an improvement would be if they had a cost model whereby you could just pay for what you're actually using. Even if it were a minimum monthly charge that they offered, if you're not utilizing all of that then they should consider a lower tier. That way, they could attract more business.

Aside from the standard usage fee there's an onboarding cost. I don't know if our prices were hardly negotiated or whether there is just a de facto price. But, in addition to the normal monthly, system-running costs, when you want to onboard a new trading partner, there's an onboarding cost. 

If you want to do any additional types of messages, there will be an implementation cost related to each message type. If you are onboarding like 10 or 20 trading partners at a time, they also have a project management cost for a defined project manager who's your main point of contact. That's how they make sure that everything gets done according to the time that they said that they were going to do it in. I've used third-party project management before for our ERP provider, and they've been shocking. So we tend to do a lot of project management ourselves. But SEEBURGER delivered. I was super-impressed.

We looked at a company called NetEDI as well as TrueCommerce. There were two more but they were discounted right at the beginning because they didn't have time for us. NetEDI EDI was ruled out quite early on so it came down to two companies.

TrueCommerce seemed really promising but I was reading a lot of negative stuff in the press and online about them; that they promised that they will deliver but they don't deliver. The sales guy was really good, but if the tech people behind it can't do what they say they're going to do... I looked at the review sites, like IT Central Station, to find out. That can sway the impact of your decision-making.

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.

Our primary use case is to send EDI documents between our partners and vendors. We're also starting now to use it as a development tool to translate SAP idocs to EDI messages and vice versa. 

When we first started, we had different systems and application, six or seven of them, globally. Using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we have reduced the number of EDI communication tools. Now, we just have this one.

The solution can support B2B/EDI, EAI, and/or ERP integration requirements. The one thing that they are pushing is that they are a single solution that can meet all those needs. It's nice to have that in one system, versus using multiple systems.

It has also increased the level of efficiency in our company's operations by about 30 to 40 percent because everything is on one tool, supporting many people at the same time, worldwide.

The SEEBURGER solution has saved us money. Although there are other tools out there that do the same thing, if we had to buy those tools it would cost us more. The money that we spend on maintenance, for example, gives us the ability to communicate with other partners without having to use another tool or another partner. That's where our cost savings are. 

I like that the tool has all the adapters — all the possible protocols that are in the industry. You pay for those adapters but at least it's all in one package. You don't have to get another tool or application to support another partner. It doesn't matter if you're in Europe or if you're in North America, the solution they have is global. It can support pretty much anything and anyone.

It's rather difficult to understand, from the application, what's broken and why it doesn't work. We typically need to get support from them directly, and it's usually in a consulting role, to fix issues.

Also, the training they provide is not really adequate. They sell you things that you can use to design things in your own way. To get them to show you how those work is very difficult. To get them to explain how their application works sometimes is difficult (depending on the customization that was done) I would like to see them build training courses and I would have no issue paying for them. Everything I know about the application is self taught.

In addition, if we ask one consultant, we get one answer and if we ask a different consultant, we get a totally different answer. If we ask someone in Europe, even within the same company, we get a different answer again. They're not globally aligned in terms of what their application does and how it's actually installed. Depending on who you talk to, you get a different answer. You could say each consultant or software engineer has their own way of implementing BIS. They could do a better job if they collaborated more internally and talked to the customers and asked questions so that we could give them examples and tell them where they could do better.

Also, their release strategy, in terms of number of updates, is very demanding; it's very quick. SEEBURGER releases an update every month, if I'm not mistaken. It would be nice if they could do semi-annual releases that are not really needed. If something is broken, you can always ask them to provide a hotfix. We can't keep up with the number of patches they have (even though we may not need it). Every time they send a patch, we have to retest everything. They could improve the frequency of their patches and maybe provide a procedure to test everything so that we don't spend hours or days validating their latest update. We don't know what that patch is going to do. We have to test it and we need a team to test it. It's something that we do overnight. We have to check every adapter, every process row, all the modules in their solution.

We've been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for roughly 10 years.

It's stable. They're always improving it. Their next release, coming out next year, has a lot of improvements. In terms of stability, they're moving in the direction of selling a standard. That's the right way to go.

The scalability is really good. That's one of the biggest features. Depending on the size of your company, how much data you have or frequency, their solution can manage it. You can grow vertically or you can grow horizontally. It really depends on the business. They have the capabilities to grow and expand and handle all that architecture.

In North America, our company has smaller needs for scalability compared to what we've seen other companies do, although it is bigger than our European side. We do have certain things that Europe doesn't have, different components or boxes in front of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) server, such as proxy servers. Security is different in North America. We have a second node that handles more of the high-volume transactions, but we really haven't fully utilized it yet. We're just getting it up and running now.

We have two production SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) applications, one for Europe and one for North America. Behind them, there are quality environments. Behind them we have another instance for their compliance checker, which is another tool. We also have a development box and a sandbox for initial patches and upgrades.

Technical support is good. The person who answers your ticket is the person who is going to solve it. They don't typically have level-one, level-two, and level-three support. The person who handles the ticket is an expert. They're users of the system. In most cases they can help you. In other cases, they will seek the support of their developers or consultants because it's out of their scope, and that's a normal way to handle those situations. Overall, the support is good.

We had a couple of previous solutions. One was Cleo LexiCom. We also had something called EDI Gateway and that's what we were using mainly, prior to this one. 

SEEBURGER is an SAP partner. When we bought SAP, because we were going with one global ERP system, our operation in Europe chose SEEBURGER at the time. I was not part of that decision but I'm happy to say they made a good choice. 

I wasn't involved in the installing of the solution. I was more involved in the configuration of it. In terms of configuring it, I didn't find it hard. If you know EDI, and you understand how protocols work, you won't find it too difficult.

It took me about nine to 10 months to migrate from one system to a different system. That covered about 40 plants. In terms of deployment, it's quick. It's just a matter of physically doing it, getting in contact with your partners and telling them, "Hey, I'm switching from this IP address to this IP address." I found it easy.

We used SEEBURGER consulting. We already had one instance in Europe. North America had to get its own instance and I was in charge of making sure that that happened: getting it installed, explaining to the consultant that these are all the flows we have today, and these are all the software components we have today. How do we put all that stuff into one box?

Our experience with them was very good. The person that we used is still with the company.

We realized savings after five years. We needed additional development as well as some minor things that we use in our company that they didn't have in their standard solution. It took us time to understand the product. During those five years we were consulting with them and needed their support to understand their tool. After that, a company should be able to be self-sufficient.

We pay maintenance of between $75,000 and $100,000 per year. The costs are based on your original purchase solution. 

As far as I can remember, the company looked at IBM Sterling and at outsourcing.

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.

On-premises

We use it for our EDI. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been at the company for three years and we've be using it since then. I'm sure it was in use way before that as well, but I don't know the exact length of time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use case is EDI: commercial messages such as purchase orders from the customer. We send invoices, credit memos, and we also have a small amount of purchase orders going out to our suppliers and their responses come back in. It's B2B. I don't think we're doing anything "wow" or extraordinary. It's quite basic, traditional EDI.

We get a file from our customers such as an XML file, standard ones from GS1, and that's converted to an IDoc which goes into SAP.

There wasn't really an improvement moving to the SEEBURGER cloud solution in the sense that the project was to replace what we had, as is. It's pretty much the same functionality from our point of view. However, some of our customers insist that we trade with them through EDI so we have to have a solution in place.

It does what it says it does, for us. We normally don't have many problems, so it's the reliability. And the message tracking is quite good, where we can go in and see if we have an issue. It's more having a query utility, rather than reporting, per se. We can query if we have issues or if something's wrong. But it's quite basic stuff.

We haven't really found that the solution's unified code base helps with problem resolution. Because it's a code-based system, we don't have much access to the logs or what's happening. So we have to log a ticket with SEEBURGER. We only get a message that something has failed. Sometimes the message is in German and it's very generic, very high-level. That could be improved, to see what's wrong, because often, it can be data-related but we have to open a ticket with SEEBURGER for them to tell us exactly what the issue is.

The error-tracking could be improved. That's a big thing. A customer will tell us they have an issue and we have to find out why it failed, because often it is a data-related issue. Maybe a field is too long or too short. I would like us to be able to be more self-sufficient. But I understand it's a cloud-based solution, so they have to own it. It's a shared system with other customers.

We've had SEEBURGER on-premise for a number of years. It's been about ten years and, in 2017, we moved to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) cloud. It's now solely via the cloud model.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had an outage. Once you have the connection up and running, it seems to work. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 5 is more stable than our previous version.

We did add in some extra processes and our volume increase doesn't seem to have caused a problem.

We don't have plans to use any of their additional services, like API management or MST invoicing or IoT at the moment because we've now invested in Microsoft Azure, where logic apps give us an integration tool.

Once you get someone assigned, they're reasonably good. It varies. Sometimes you get someone who seems quite junior and you have to explain everything to them, and when they do changes they don't work the first time. And other times you get someone who's really good and they fix the thing very fast.

It was ten years ago, but we were using a solution called Sterling Commerce. We switched because of cost.

When we made the decision to go with SEEBURGER, our key selection criterion was that the company had history, that it was an established company. But they were also involved in developing our solution so we thought it was a bigger risk to go with another supplier.

We recently switched over to the cloud-based version and that process went on for a long while. It seemed like an initial deployment because they had to rework everything. They didn't lift and shift a lot of our mapping which was done in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They rewrote it from scratch because they have this new method where they convert everything to XML and then they convert it to an IDoc. There's some standard process for that, but it seemed to take an awfully long while to move from our on-premise to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 5 in the cloud. Elapsed time was about nine to ten months. There were a number of changes in the solution as well.

We found it complex because we did have to involve SEEBURGER's senior management at one of the stages, regarding how they wanted to transition. We did find it frustrating.

Our strategy - and the main reason we went with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) - was that we would take "as is," and bring that across to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 5. That was the plan. From my understanding, they already had mapping for some of our customers, the larger, well-known ones, but it did seem to take an awfully long while to implement our solution.

And then, we did have complexity with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 5 system where it wouldn't work with our VAN here in Ireland So we had to move to AS2. That could have accounted for some of the delay in implementing our project.

We worked directly with SEEBURGER. Our main dealings were with a developer who was doing the mapping and there were some dealings with their technical people who were setting up connections. The latter was pretty straightforward. It was mainly around developing the maps that most of the time was spent. We had one person working with them. He was involved in the initial scoping with SEEBURGER and then in testing the maps and providing feedback.

It's a must-have product for us. What we do with it is quite straightforward so we still have the same number of support staff and we haven't reduced costs. It's not increasing revenue either. It's not a reason why a client would do business with us. They do business with us because of our brand, but it's a must-have for us to be able to do EDI with them.

We pay per message we use. We spend about £19,000 a year with them. If we go over our band we obviously pay extra.

We didn't evaluate other solutions at that time. SEEBURGER came recommended and we went with them. SAP put us in touch with them.

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.