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 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.

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.

Our primary use case for it is as an integration tool. We've got lots of systems. We are a service company in warehousing and transport and we've got a lot of customers. We are a 3PL company so we do transport for a lot of the big retailers. All of this has to be integrated. We've got small applications running everywhere, so any data which flows through from one application to another requires SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Warehousing is our major function. We get orders from our clients, retailers that you know. Some of them use EDI, some use API, and some use web services. They come through our system and they get formatted into our standard warehouse management system, which is Manhattan. Order information has to be formatted in the Manhattan XML format.

On the transport side, there are different applications. We have Freighter which does the load planning and then there is route planning which is a separate application hosted by Paragon. The route planning information goes from the orders which we received to the Paragon system, and the orders also go to Freighter for load planning.

In addition, there is information from the warehouse system that has to go back to our big retail customers, such as stock received, dispatch confirmation, receipt confirmation, and any stock adjustments. There are different types of interfaces which go back and forth between our customers and our warehouse management systems.

There is some B-to-B integration and then we have application-to-application as well. For example, the warehouse management system might talk directly to the transport system, which is web-service or API-driven. Sometimes they can't do it themselves, so SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) will step in to capture the data from the warehouse management system. It will do the API service to communicate with another system and get the results and push them. So it acts as a gateway for everything coming in and out of our company, a secure gateway.

Many of our customers still use file transfer, so we use SFTP a lot. Most of the interfaces are migrating to web services, SOAP or API. Those are the latest but we still have a lot of SFTP used.

It is hosted by us, internally.

It helps in communications. It's the only gateway between our client systems and any internally-hosted or cloud-hosted systems. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an interface between them. It provides a lot of benefits to our customers. If SEEBURGER were to go down, our company would be in limbo.

It's a very vital system. We are dependent on it because we have hundreds of major customers, all of which are big retailers. Without SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), their orders and other communications may not go to the warehouse. There might be manual processes but that would be very hard.

It's been a good tool so far. It's helped us do things which we were not able to do. Most applications nowadays are third-party applications which require data in particular formats and there are restrictions on them. We can't modify third-party applications. The best we can do is use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to massage or reformat the data from one format to another and say, "Okay, if you want it this way you will get it this way."

That's what SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has been good at: communicating between two applications, changing formats and using the required protocols. Some might have applications which are very old and they can't do more than FTP or SFTP. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) we've got that flexibility. We can have one site communicating in an old FTP or SFTP style, or via file transfer. And with other applications, we could have API or a web service call or some other protocol used to send information. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an intermediary between them.

We wanted to use API. We were told that in 6.52 we could use API management. Later on, we found that API management wasn't that completely integrated into the 6.52 solution, and if you wanted to have the whole API suite you might have to go to 6.7, the latest one.

We are waiting for that. There is talk that next year we might try to migrate to 6.7. Migration is not an issue on our side, but it's the customer migration which takes a lot of time. That involves a lot of concern and hard work because we have to have the customers onboarded as well and they need to do some testing. It's always really hard to get the customers to find time for that.

It has been quite stable. We haven't had any issues after getting the system up and running. It has run very well. Maintenance is also very good and support is also okay. They've got a lot of screens and other things which help. There are proactive error notifications so we can see what's happening. It has a nice front-end screen which monitors all the adapters. If there are any issues on anything, we can see them on one screen. 

We never have problems, as such, with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but we had issues which were related to the network or the machine or the database not working, getting full, or going down. But as far as the software is concerned, we haven't had any major issues. We have had minor issues which were immediately looked at and rectified by SEEBURGER.

We have a DR system for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's all saved if something goes wrong. We have multiple data centers so it's not been an issue. We have never had any major downtime.

The scalability depends on the price - which suite you're getting. At the moment, the version we are on, which is 6.52, is quite scalable because it has one adapter engine. 

Their architecture includes an admin server and an adapter server so you can just add more servers by adding licenses to it. If we want to scale up, we just a few more adapter engines into it; it's just adding a virtual server and more functions to it. It's not a big issue. Its scalability is very good at the moment. The software installation is not a big issue. So once you install it, you can just attach it to the existing architecture.

We have a lot of end-users sending files: FTP, SFTP, web services, or HTTP; and there are other services like AS2. We have about 75 to 80 customers and they interact with us with a file or data transfer.

It is our preferred tool at the moment. It's part of our strategy. I don't know about the future, but currently it is the only tool that we are using for interfacing with our various systems. We are still hoping to host most of the system. Most systems are migrating to the cloud, so we don't know yet. There it would an application-to-application connection, so maybe the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) role might be reduced, but currently it's used a lot.

One thing we need is more support. Sometimes we get stuck on the support because they've not got not many experienced people in the UK for the suite. We have modified SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) a lot to fit our organization. We have customized it. Sometimes we find it hard to get support from their side. Most of the time their help has been good from Germany because that's what they are based. They do help but we struggled before, at times.

The second-tier is needed if there is any problem where consultation is needed to go in-depth and see what the issue might be. We lack some good help from the other side on that level.

We had an issue where the customer wanted specific things and we couldn't do it.

We were using IBM Mercator which they now call WebSphere. The move to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) started because at that time the company wanted to check into systems which could support new interfaces. The system we had was an old system, so we needed to upgrade it. It was a choice the business had to go through but I wasn't involved in the team that handled the selection.

The setup is complex but we get the SEEBURGER implementers to come out, the consultants who do it the first time, whenever we have a major upgrade. Recently, we have tried to do all the service packs ourselves, but if there is a major upgrade - and most probably when we migrate to 6.7 - we require some consulting time from SEEBURGER because there might be a major change in the way some of the interfaces or communication might be working. That might be when we require a lot of consulting time from SEEBURGER, to understand the product and what features it has and what capabilities we can use.

Major upgrades are as demanding as an initial deployment, but if it's just a service pack, it's okay now. They have made it much simpler. Because we are on Active-Active, we can do patching while the service is still running.

Our initial deployment, back in 2009, took about two days. The software deployment only takes a day or so. But we also had to get all the hardware, the machines, and network service. Those took time. But the software deployment and configuration took just a day-and-a-half.

For that deployment, SEEBURGER people did not just do the deployment, they also worked on initial interface development for us. There were new mapping tools and we didn't have any experience with it, so they did that also. We had a contract with them for three months or so to have them do a lot of work for us. They had two or three consultants who basically converted a lot of the old IBM maps into the new SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS)-format maps.

At that time it was a big project because after installation they had to do the maps etc. Everything had been in IBM until that time. They had to replicate that into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Now that we have more experience and good resources on our side, we do it ourselves. But at that time it took a total of six months, of which three months were for the initial consulting where we had two or three consultants. After that, it was only one consultant.

At that time it was a new thing for us so we were not in a rush. We installed and tested everything and we migrated one customer at a time. We had an old, IBM-based integration tool. The installation was done as a "blank canvas," and then we migrated our customers.

For a major upgrade, we set aside a period of seven days because we've got quite a few systems: a development system, a test system, a UAT or business integration system, and the production system. We go by step-by-step, so the whole process will take a week. On the first day, we'll do the development system and let it run for two days. Then we will upgrade the test system and let it run for two days to see if there are any issues. Then we will go to UAT, and after two days or so, the production system, which might be on a Sunday. It's an issue of timing because we have to get our change-control times allocated, especially when doing an upgrade to the production system.

We generally work with SEEBURGER. Once, when we had a lot of work to do, we did use a Polish company. I don't remember their name. We used them for a short period.

Finding SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) expertise is very hard. There isn't much SEEBURGER expertise in the UK. I don't think many major organizations are using it in the UK. I know they have very big customers in the US and Germany.

It's very hard to quantify ROI basically because we don't see the financial aspect it. Our job is to ensure that it is running and that we get the output and whatever is needed from it. But financially, if it was down, the impact might be humongous for our company.

The cost-based model is slightly different now in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They changed the licensing, based on adapters and other things. In the old style of licensing, the whole suite was one license, if I'm not mistaken. 

There is the license and then a run-cost.

But that's handled by my team leaders. I'm not into it involved in the cost and related issues.

They went through the selection process to see what interfacing applications were available in the market.

My advice would depend on the purpose you're considering SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for. If you are going to use it like we are using it, I would say it is a really good tool. If you have restrictions where you can't change the applications you have - you host a lot of third-party applications and you need to integrate the data between each of those applications, then SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is one of the best tools available. There are other tools, but this one is one of the best.

We may look to use the solution’s additional services such as its MFT (managed file transfer).

We have three integration specialists and one team leader for maintenance of the solution. We also have a design lead but he's not entirely dedicated to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS); he does design for other things as well.

We have seen version 6.7 and we want to migrate but we have not because migration is a big task for us. It might take some time.

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.

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.