SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest lesson we've learned throughout our time using it is not only a lesson with SEEBURGER but with all remote vendors, because everything was done remotely. That meant we had to be very clear in communication and in logging issues and tickets with them. And it required a large amount of testing because even though there's the standard format, every customer does something different or has different requirements. We probably underestimated the testing required. Those were the two big lessons for us.

It was quite late in our project that we established that our VAN provider couldn't communicate with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). So my advice would be to establish that upfront. Make sure there's a really good ticketing system and any issues are well-documented because the implementation is going to be remote. Also, have a very good estimate of how many messages you process so you can buy the right package or service level from them.

We have simplified how we track errors because at times there will be maybe an issue on the customer because a product is not set up, for example. We batch our invoices, so we would need to find which files need to be resent. We've simplified that, but that's done in our ERP system. The other simplification we did, which was SEEBURGER-related, was that we update the status of our SAP documents which communicate with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). That was an improvement for tracking errors because now we just go to SAP to find out the status of an IDoc. We have the status that it was sent, whereas before, we would only know that it was sent to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) system. That was an improvement for us.

I don't think SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has saved us money. We had an on-premise system which was at end-of-life. The service charge replaced the maintenance on that. So it's about the same, maybe a little bit more.

It's good that they're putting effort into R&D, rather than investing in brand awareness, but if we, as a potential customer, are not aware of it, we're not going to look to use it. I'm not overly aware of what SEEBURGER is doing or how they can help us. They have tried to have meetings with us sometimes but we're very busy because we're now in the middle of doing an ERP migration.

I've heard the solution can transfer other documents, like PDFs and marketing documents and that it can do other things besides the standard EDI messages we use. But currently, we have other tools that do that sort of stuff, like Microsoft Azure, etc. I don't think we have any plans to increase our footprint with SEEBURGER at the moment.

We only have two users of the solution because it just works away in the background. It's like a blackbox solution to us. The only time anyone would have reason to go into it is if we had a problem. It doesn't require much maintenance from us. And really, there's not much we can do either. We can just see there's a problem and then log a call.

I would rate the product around a seven out of ten. The product is reliable. We don't have any outages. We do get the messages. Everything is converted. And there is a query tool. It's pretty basic. I would like to see more features. And I would like to be able to do a bit more to troubleshoot, rather than having to log a ticket straight away.

They're quite pleasant people to deal with. It's just getting the resources. They did have a resource issue when we were doing our implementation and there was some restructuring happening at their end.

It is primarily an EDI translator for us. We have over 1,000 trading relationships running through it, totaling a couple of million documents. We don't just have EDI flowing through the platform. We have XML documents from some partners, and other things flowing inbound and outbound. But the bulk of it is EDI.

Our deployment is on-premise. We went that way because we knew the cost of doing it the other ways was more expensive. And in general, that is the model that we use.

The benefit of using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), one that we like to tout right now, is the interaction of the solution's front end with the CMA module that we purchased from them. We're able to create surveys around testing processes and the automation of the actual testing. Using that survey, it will link to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end so that partners can actually do testing on their own. They get feedback and data testing, based upon our actual requirements around EDI documents. It works 24/7.

The reason we tout this so much is that we had a backlog of 100-plus partners. It was taking an average of 66 days to get a partner up, from start to finish, through all the documents that we require. This solution has reduced it down to an average of six days, with zero backlog. That's a significant improvement.

We were having to do a lot of it manually before and this is one of the big things that we hype. It's a combination of both suites: the CMA component with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end. That's by far the biggest benefit that we can name.

We use some of their other tools, like the Imart web platform, for some of our smaller vendors. That has been helpful in reducing the cost on their side from having to do EDI.

But the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end, in and of itself - having that EDI translator straight out-of-the-box - and being able to move stuff away from IT development into the actual business side, has been helpful.

Also, with the alerting and everything else that we get out of it, we're a lot more efficient. We're able to focus more on problems with our partners, versus reacting to systemic issues. We don't see a lot of systemic problems through the platform, so we're able to respond to our partners in a quicker fashion.

Among the most valuable features are the EDI translator and a lot of the components which enable creating compliance sets. Having something standard, out-of-the-box, and being able to use that has been a huge benefit for us. We came from a system, in the past, where we were having to manually create all that on our own, and it was very time-consuming and costly. Being able to do that out-of-the-box has been great.

Another aspect that we employed in the last year-and-a-half has been their CMA platform component, which hooks to the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) front end. We've been able to set up an automatic testing process for our partners. They can walk through and test all their documents, in the sequence that our company would be expecting to pass and exchange them, without any interaction with someone in our company.

They made improvements to the email error alerts that go out, for the EDI technical. Those typically go straight out to the partners. Those messages are significantly clearer and easy to read. The same messages in the front end are not nearly as clear. It's supposed to be the same error, but the message that goes out for EDI is really easy for anybody to read and understand, but you have to be really solution-savvy to understand the message in the system itself.

That is the component that we definitely have the biggest issue with. Unless we want to go search for an email, trying to read the actual message in the platform is tough.

Also, some of the functionality for retriggering documents, where you have to step through a termination process and then retrigger it, versus just being able to restart or retrigger more easily, is a bit challenging, depending on the scenario.

Three to five years.

We had some incidents during the first year but it seems to have become more stable every year, as we've learned something, or figured out something. During this last year-and-a-half we've had almost zero incidents.

We have no problems with its scalability. We did a performance test where we did about eight times our volume through it in a single hour, for an entire heavy week, and it handled it. We've had no issues with it. Everything we've added to it - multiple documents inside the implementation, different components to it - we've had no issues. It's handled it all.

If I just look at the consultant we have who is dedicated to our company, he's awesome; great.

There are some challenges with the Premium Support. I don't know if it's because they're based in Germany. I know our infrastructure at times has been posing the wrong information questions. But it's been challenging at times, and other times it's been great. Part of the problem is that they always want the logs and those aren't always available. But for the most part, support has been good. For what I've had to use them for, their response times have been fairly good; within expectations.

We had an older version of webMethods, which was not an EDI translator. Comparing SEEBURGER BIS vs webMethods, the latter was just a communications broker. We knew we needed to switch for a long time. We got to the point where we could no longer upgrade that platform or do anything else because of the heavy customization and programming that had been done to it.

Because it was something brand new for us it was challenging, but I would expect that with most programs. Where we struggled the most was with some of the training that we got from the SEEBURGER team. Until we had a more sit-down discussion with them, we were a bit challenged, especially on the business side. That had more to do with the trainers than it did the actual platform itself.

We started the deployment in June of 2015 and finished up putting in the last document in October of 2015. Our deployment went really fast, surprisingly. We actually had projected it to be 18 months, and it took us significantly less, once we got rolling.

In terms of an implementation strategy, once we got through all that, it was getting in the servers. We had a lot of EIP stuff (Enterprise Information Protection) they had to work through. Then we started out by moving over specific documents, based on business processes and then communication protocols.

I can't remember on the IT side how much of our staff was involved in the implementation but we had the Business Operational Unit involved. The operational team had six full-time employees and two development groups. We also had two change-management people and two IT people who directed. They were the IT people we were worked with directly in bringing up the business part of the process. There were other IT focused on the hardware and internet connection changes. We also had one full-time, dedicated SEEBURGER consultant here with us on-site.

For maintenance on a day-to-day basis, the way our EDI operations are set up today, there are four full-time employees and one manager. They work on SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and everything we have flowing through it, as well as all the partners. In addition, we have two development people but they don't use it on a daily basis.

We did it directly with SEEBURGER.

With all the new processes and stuff that we've added, one of the big benefits we've seen is that we've never had to increase headcount. We've been able to accommodate everything. Because of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) our development, and ourselves on the business side, have been able to stand up new documents, new processes, new flows, with a reduced headcount. It's enabled business to handle more of it, as opposed to being an IT function.

There was a big list, including the IBM solution. There were six other platforms but it was three-and-a-half years ago.

Both our US and Canadian operations evaluated the same companies then, and SEEBURGER was chosen in Canada. When we did the evaluation again, here in the US, we ended up with pretty much the same results. The fact that Canada was using it helped make the decision to go with it.

My advice would be to make sure you have a good, strong change-management group which can assist and help along the way. If you're not coming from something like we did, it can be a struggle getting people to adapt and change. It's not so much the system, it's the people that'll be utilizing it. It also helps if you have a strong SEEBURGER consultant there who makes sure that your IT people fully understand what's expected and where they're going with it.

We don't use the Landscape Manager at this time but it is something we're looking at.

In terms of the Active-Active feature, that's part of IT while I'm on the business side. I know it's being utilized. We have had very few issues with the load volume passing through it. It handles it well. Sometimes we see a few spikes, but they don't last and they don't cause any system issues.

When it comes to adding integrations, the way we're utilizing it, a lot of it seems to be pretty fluid. We haven't had a ton of issues. We use middleware. We don't allow direct-connect to any other platforms, at least on the US-side of our operations. We have various file formats that we have to convert the documents into, and putting them through message queues, or through the NAS Exchange, has been pretty easy. If we have issues, it seems to be on the other side of the ball, where they didn't set up their interaction or integration correctly.

We increase the usage every year. To give you an idea, 99 percent of all our purchase orders through our vendor partners run through the platform. The one percent are new partners who are still working at getting their EDI up. For the purpose of trading most documents with us, the bulk of it goes through this platform, whether it's invoicing, shipping notices, purchase orders, changes, etc.

We're looking at what they're offering for the 6.7 upgrade. We're definitely strongly interested in the new Message Tracking upgrade. Landscape Designer is being looked at for our infrastructure group, for being able to handle upgrades and service pack upgrades. And there is the potential move, eventually, to go to 6.7.

I would give the platform itself an eight out of ten. As I said, I have a problem with the error messages that are in the system.

We use the solution for EDI and file swaps, but it will be used for all integrations going forward.

We can control our upgrade cycle instead of being dependent on cloud vendor timing. We are also able to build and deploy quickly, but our speed is limited by our SOX controls.

• Scalability. We have not had to add processing power or hardware since we installed it.
• We are able to create and deploy maps to migrate from another EDI platform very quickly.
• The Active-Active feature probably also helps but it's hard to say for sure because we didn't have much load on the system prior to implementing it.

A true debugger that allows you to step through the process would be a good improvement. Right now, we are limited to reading the log file generated by the test screen in Mapping Designer.

It is very stable.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is highly scalable. Since moving to Active-Active we have not had to change our environment.

Technical support has always been great.

We switched from Dell AtomSphere.

The initial setup was somewhat complex. I would say you need SEEBURGER Professional Services to help you through it.

Deployment took a couple of days for each environment. Our implementation strategy was to deploy to our Dev/QA environments first and production at a later time. We deployed on-premise as we prefer to control the environment of our mission-critical systems.

Pricing has always seemed fair.

We evaluated:

• SEEBURGER BIS vs Dell AtomSphere
• SEEBURGER BIS vs Software AG
• SEEBURGER BIS vs MuleSoft
• SEEBURGER BIS vs SAP PI.

Create a matrix of criteria to evaluate all tools fairly.

In our company, we have ten to 12 users of the solution and they are very technical development/support people. Deployment and maintenance are shared among a team of people but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) requires almost no maintenance.

EDI with automotive businesses is our primary use case.

For us, it's all been about the fact that, for the first time ever our two facilities can support each other. Before, we had completely separate systems. One was doing EDI and one wasn't and our customers were trying to understand how we could be one company and not do things the same way. For the first time, we can start doing things the same way. That means that I can have customer service in one facility support customer service in the second facility.

We started with our Canadian plant first and got it running. When the next plant came on we were just able to say in SAP, "Here are some new ship-to's." We didn't have to start re-testing with the customer. That saved a ton of work. Not needing to retest for the next facility, because the customer had accepted our first test, was very helpful.

In terms of our reaction time, I can say we are 50 percent faster from our American plant. We aren't faster in our Canadian plant, but that's only because we're also looking at trying the on-premise, so it's just from looking at too much at once. For the American side, they wouldn't say "yes" to a customer for years, but now they can, which is great.

It has a lot of basic EDI already established for all the main users.

Also, it lets me share setups that I had already set up for my first plant. I was able to use them for my second one which was very helpful. I didn't have to start from scratch for my second facility.

I would've liked, from day one, to learn how to do my own mapping. It would have saved a lot of time and effort if that had been brought forward earlier. It's there, I just didn't know about it.

Also, some tidier, easier-to-use interfaces would help.

One to three years.

It's a stable solution. In the year-and-a-half that we've been live, we've had one or two tiny blips. But you get the warning right away and you can reissue it. And it never repeats itself. Those are pretty good stats.

It's far bigger than we would ever need. Our company would never have an issue with their scalability. It goes far and beyond what we need.

I know my colleague in Germany values the technical support greatly. But the system works so well that he generally only needs it if a customer sends in a map that isn't straightforward. For me, on the on-premise side, the American tech support has been super-helpful and they bend over backward for me. If we could all have Daniel work onsite, that would be a dream. But they're all super-helpful. Everyone has bent over backward for us.

We went to SEEBURGER because we needed a global solution for the first time in our company's history. Up until then, each plant used to use its own EDI solution, because we had our own ERP solution. We switched to SEEBURGER to have a global solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I gave them an Excel and they did the work. I liked that.

Due to SEEBURGER jumping right on board for us in America, we did it fast. We didn't start talking until about the end of March, and we went live July first. So the workload was heavy from the end of May and June. There was some cleanup of some stuff after that, but they really pushed hard for us.

We were supposed to have set it up with SEEBURGER Germany, but somehow that got missed. So our implementation strategy was to jump on with SEEBURGER America. They were super-flexible and they helped us get all the information and make sure we were ready for the first plant, and then we went live in the second plant in October.

The only problems were caused by us because we didn't have enough manpower here.

I find the pricing expensive. But I know that when we evaluated another company, it was about the same. That just seems to be the market. It's probably not expensive overall.

Make sure your internal team has the manpower required and the knowledge, of course. It's big. It shouldn't be left up to SEEBURGER, the way I did. I made them do more work than they should have had to do.

To use the on-premise you need to have good technical people, not just business knowledge but also technical. That might be a drawback for some companies. The advantage is that they cover the EDI world: EDA, EDIFACT, ANSI. The American guys are great at their ANSI and EDIFACT and the European guys are great at EDA and EDIFACT. I don't know if it's true that every software company out there is able to cover all three of those worlds as well as these guys seem to.

In North America, there are only two of us using the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Cloud version. It's 90 percent me doing all of the checking, communicating, and updating with the SEEBURGER team and my one SAP team member is there to back me up or answer questions. I don't think he's been on it since January 2018. We have two solutions, we have cloud and we have on-premise. Two more people use the on-premise.

Our plan is that we're actually moving everything to on-premise now. There will be two main people, myself and my colleague in Germany, who will be to the two main people for maintenance, and we're looking at one minor role in both Europe and America that will just be there to get the alerts, making sure there are no stoppages during the day. But the two of us will be the ones installing maps. If there's a map adjustment required, I would work on that, but the two of us will be doing the installing and mapping of the communication and new users.

In terms of the extent of usage and plans to grow, we have three plants using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), two plants on cloud, one on-premise. We just moved a small plant to on-premise last month and our plan is to move two more. Then, as our company rolls out SAP, we're looking at moving three more. If Asia jumps into EDI someday, it will grow even more, but right now the Asian market isn't using EDI. We'll see how that works out. We're hoping to, within the next year, move a Spanish plant onto it as well.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten because it covers as much as it does. It's not higher because I think it might be missing a little bit of the non-automotive world. They focused on the big EDI-hitters, versus some of what I call the "industrial applications." That's the only place I've seen where it doesn't seem to be as strong.

The reason that we bought the product was that we have a very robust healthcare inventory environment in SAP here at the university. That involves huge inventory, purchase orders with 300 lines, electronic invoices, 856s, 855s. We knew we were going to have to have some standalone EDI ability here. That was the main goal of getting it, which we very quickly accomplished.

Coming into the SAP implementation here, coming over from our legacy EDI product, at that time we had 12 EDI vendors. It took us 12 years to get those 12 vendors, due to the limitations of our legacy product. Now, there are many hundreds because of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We easily have 300 vendors now.

Before, we were completely limited by the ability of our legacy system. Our ability to react has gone up 1,000 percent. What improved was the ability to bring on who we wanted when we wanted to at the pace we wanted to. Before, if our legacy software did not already have an EDI arrangement with the vendor, we couldn't do EDI with them. When we got this, we were off to the races. We were free to connect at will with whomever we wanted to. It gave us freedom.

When we brought in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we had one hospital, back in 2009 or so. We bought another large hospital and we picked it right up. We put it right on. EDI wasn't even a factor. It added no complexity to bringing in that new hospital.

Certainly, the majority of all of the inventory transactions and all of our PunchOut Catalog for research areas on campus go through EDI. 

We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) EDI for invoicing for our pharmaceuticals, where they handle the invoicing and invoice approvals. We then bring the electronic invoices into SAP from there and they go to an automatic hold in SAP and then they're released. So we have been able to use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to provide big invoicing solutions. In fact, here at the university, just for pharmacy alone, we're probably bringing in over $40 million a year in electronic invoices through SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's easily in the neighborhood of over $100 million when it comes to meds, surgery supplies, and healthcare.

While we use it for EDI, straight up, for electronic invoicing and PO communication and confirmations, it is flexible to where we can bring it in to accommodate specialty solutions for the university such as payments for pharmaceuticals.

Number one, the ease of integration of the SEEBURGER product into SAP was pretty seamless. There wasn't any trouble, there weren't any complexities.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) also allowed us to connect EDI vendors at will.

We use SRM here as well and it's required at our university that we use EDI for all of those, for that PunchOut functionality, so that we have full-blown automation with it, in and out; for the purchase order going out the door and getting the invoice in, etc. 

What it has really brought to us is the ease of connectivity to the outside world, to do B2B. No paper, everything is electronic.

More than five years.

It's an extremely stable platform. It has no flakiness. We don't have to baby it.

We've been able to flex it where we needed to, to accommodate other silo systems, outside of our core component applications. It's about to be tested again when we get into this new P2P solution we're looking at. I've still got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) on the table as part of that solution, so I would say that it's very scalable.

When I log a ticket, they come back within half-an-hour to an hour, either by email or I'll get a call. I maybe have one ticket a year, if that. There haven't been many, but they've always been very responsive, and pretty quickly.

The response that we get and the knowledge of that individual that responds are high-quality. It's not like we get a phone call back from someone who's appeasing us until they can get the real guy to fix it. When we get a response back from support, it is an individual who understands the issue and provides the solution.

Service and support have been excellent from SEEBURGER. We haven't really needed to use the product for a whole lot of other things - and I'm sure it's totally capable of them. It's one of those products where it's doing a very powerful thing for us, but you just don't hear about it because we don't have a lot of issues with it, unless we have a server that does down. But that would be an internal problem. It wouldn't really be a SEEBURGER issue.

We had a legacy system called Enterprise Solutions, and it was a healthcare-specific procurement and inventory system that was born in the late 1980s. When we decided to go to SAP in the early 2000s, our legacy system was going to be sun-setted. We had to do something because our then-current product was dying. When we decided to go with SAP, it did not natively deliver the EDI functionality. We went and got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we bolted the two together, and moved forward.

One of our guys was a systems programmer coming into this. When we got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), it was clear that it was going to take more of a technical person. It does take a technically-rooted individual to operate it. It's not something for your everyday guy to do. For what it's doing for us, a dedicated resource is required. You have to put a real technical dude in there to run it.

Like anything new, there's a learning curve, but it wasn't that difficult. It just hasn't been hard.

Our deployment took about a week. We put it in and turned it on in a week, and that's including firing up the box and loading the software and getting our guy up to speed. The deployment was extremely quick, and because it does integrate so well with SAP that made it easier too.

The implementation strategy was that we knew we were going to go big-time EDI when we went with SAP. That was a real requirement for healthcare. They told us they do EDI, we asked a few people about them, and did a bid for it. They came with just an unbelievably great price. The university bought it, and they put us in a room with two guys from SEEBURGER and we figured out how to get it in, and it's been there ever since.

We did have our implementation partners, who were helping us put in SAP at the time, from LSI Consulting, and they did help us with the SAP connections. We also had a couple of other consultants at the beginning.

We went from 12 EDI vendors to 300 in a very quick fashion. We have exceeded the estimated ROI with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

The pricing is cheap. In fact, when I saw the pricing, I thought, "Really? What's the catch?" But the functionality that we get out of it, for the price we pay, is great value.

We had IBM come in and do presentations. We had Sterling Commerce come in and do presentations. And we had a conversation with SEEBURGER. 

IBM came in here, they sent 15 guys and tried to sell us a solution that was doing 50 things that I did not want, did not need, did not care about. They didn't understand that, no matter how hard I tried to explain it to them. All they wanted to do was to tell you about how wonderful they were and how powerful this tool was that they wanted me to pay a million dollars for. 

Then, the second vendor, which was Sterling Commerce, toned it down some, but it was still a very potent tool. And the price was very high. 

I had specific requirements that I had to meet for EDI. When SEEBURGER showed up on the scene, they said, "Okay, we'll give you EDI, and check out this price." It was everything that we needed to get done, and even today it's still what we need. They didn't overkill it. They didn't try to sell me a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't need. They sold me the right functionality at the right time at the right price.

The first thing I would say to anyone looking at a solution is to make sure you understand your requirements. That's where you have to start with any product solution. Then, make sure you buy what you need to accommodate your solution, but no more. Don't get caught up in the moment and the bells and whistles. Get what you need. For someone who is looking for a killer EDI solution, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), if you ask me, is hard to beat. 

We're not out there doing things like mobile data entry. We're not a power company or a telephone company that's doing billing from work out in the environment. We're not a cable installer sending the bill back to the company for the service he just performed. We're doing invoices from vendors. Natively, that's the root of where SEEBURGER grew from, and it's solid for us.

Regarding the SAP S4/HANA migration, at this point, we are planning on moving to S4 around the 2020 timeframe. We've been very much in a road-mapping process. We've got a number of large initiatives to complete. Right now we're on ECC 6, 7, 8. We're at the point where we cannot upgrade any farther. We're on the latest version of SAP we can go to without going to S4. The plan is to definitely go there in 2020.

We are also in the process of looking at a new P2P solution. We're going to replace our SRM incidence for a couple of reasons. SRM is just not doing what it really needs to be doing and we need a much prettier front-end shopping experience. It's another opportunity for us to look at our business processes too. With that, we're going to probably do a lot of the cXML stuff out the door, to vendors, through that product. However, I do still see the use of the EDI stuff for our hospital inventory solution. I don't see an end to that anytime soon. I still see SEEBURGER very much in the future with S4, here at the university.

We use it for its core native functionality right now. When we move into this new P2P solution that we're looking at, we will do whatever we can to utilize SEEBURGER functionality in that solution. We're at the cusp where we're about to run into a situation where we're going to ask more of SEEBURGER, but that's still in the planning stages.

With SEEBURGER, pretty much what we do is EDI. We don't do a whole lot of other things with it. We do all the standard stuff, 858s, 855s, 810s, 856s. And that's okay because it's doing its job it is doing it well.

In terms of users, we have our EDI guy and he pretty much lives and breathes this solution daily. Then there's the materials management team that handles procurement and inventory solutions for the university and is made up of two functional people and three technicals. We have a chief developer, an interface developer, and our EDI developer, who is our metadata guru guy. So we have three people here at the university who know how to keep the solution going on a daily basis.

Our instance is still very much on-prem. We've got servers in our own data center, the database is onsite. It's not in the cloud. Obviously, cloud solutions are the future, and one day we'll get there, but we still love on-prem here. We do have some cloud solutions, like SAP Ariba Contract Management, but we're not full-blown committed to cloud life yet.

We don't use the Landscape Manager. We'd be very much interested in finding out more about that.

We do plan to increase usage. We continuously add new EDI vendors. It's not uncommon that we get one a week and we do plan to involve this solution as much as possible with our P2P solution, going forward.

Computers are machines created by men. So anytime human beings are involved, every once in a while one of the lights is going to turn red. That's part of life. But as far as a scale of one to ten with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) goes, I give them the ten. We're just not beating down the doors of the SEEBURGER folks saying, "Man, we got issues here." That just hasn't happened. If there was anything like that, that certainly would pull me off of that ten, but it hasn't happened. It does everything, and more, that we've asked it to do and at a very economical price.

We are using it mainly for EDI with a wide variety of trading partners. We do a lot of EDI transactions with a lot of our customers and vendors, as well as a few healthcare providers.

We have a lot of transactions, but we don't really have that big of a load. On a daily basis, we have around 2,000 transactions.

The EDI implementation that we used before took a while for us. Now we are able to do it pretty quickly. For the tool that we used to have, we had specially trained developers who used to do all the development of EDI maps and the configuration. But with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) now, we were able to train our EDI analysts, and because the tool has very simple, intuitive mapping capabilities, even our EDI analysts are able to develop all the EDI maps, do all the configurations, and do all the setups for any of the trading partners.

All in all, it has simplified our EDI implementation. It takes less time now.

In terms of adding integrations, whenever we have to, for example, add any new EDI trading partner, we are able to use existing maps that we have for other trading partners. It's like making a copy and creating a new map from that existing map and doing very minor changes here and there.

Also, when it comes to reaction time, when we started using this tool, initially, of course, we did not really have any people who were trained or had any experience on the tool. It was pretty new for us. Overall, the implementation time, the time it takes people to build new maps, has more to do with experience. But we have been able to reduce, by at least one-third, the time it takes, compared to what it used to take.

In general, I think the EDI tools that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has are pretty robust, pretty easy to use.

One thing that comes to mind is the service-oriented architecture. I have seen, in some of the other middleware tools, that you can create one service and then reuse it, without creating a copy. As I mentioned earlier, we create a copy of an existing map. In some of the other tools out there in the market, you can create one service and use that service without creating a copy. That kind of capability currently doesn't exist in this solution.

Also, these days, a lot of these companies are providing their solutions on the cloud. I think SEEBURGER has some presence there, but we're not really using it. For the future, they may have to provide more of a cloud-based solution.

More than five years.

The solution is pretty stable compared to what we used to have. We used to have a lot of memory-related issues, and we would have to restart the application multiple times. But SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is pretty stable.

There are regular production support issues, but other than those system-related issues, we don't really have that many.

Scalability-wise, I think there is still some scope but, overall, it's pretty scalable.

Tech support is pretty good. We have a Premium Support package, so they respond pretty quickly to us. They have offices in Germany and the US and they answer depending on who is available. They're pretty responsive and knowledgeable too.

We used to have a different solution. At the time that we bought this tool, we had also acquired another company. That company used to use a different tool. And for us, we were just using AS/400. We were trying to go to a better system that had more EDI capabilities. With the AS/400 we did not have a lot of capabilities that we were looking for in an EDI tool.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) fit very well with what we were looking for in the solution that we wanted to have in our company.

We utilized the Professional Services of SEEBURGER. They came and did all the installation for us. We had some of the solution architects from our company design what the system landscape should look like but, all in all, it was SEEBURGER that did the installation of the product.

When we bought SEEBURGER, at the same time we acquired another company. So it was like an SAP implementation we were trying to do and, on top of that, we acquired that other company. For us the project went pretty long because of all the complexities and all these other developments. It took us around a year or so until we first put something into production.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we just had the SEEBURGER consultants initially do some training for us. They did all the installation, and after we got the training, we did all the development and the implementation of the solution, as such.

As I said above, the tool that we used to have required those developers. We don't have those developers anymore, so we are saving that money. We have the same number of EDI analysts and they are able to do all the mapping. Because of the ease of use of the tool and the capabilities that the tool provides, we reduced the human resources that we used to need to support the previous tools. That's some money we are saving every year.

In terms of licensing also, it's cheaper than what we used to have. And, of course, the number of EDI partners that we are implementing is also a savings for us, moving any manual customers to EDI.

Pricing, compared to the tool that we had earlier, is cheaper. 

The way they have their licensing structure set up, they have a lot of different modules. For us, we did not really know if we were licensed for certain things or not. We had to reach out to them multiple times to tell them that we were looking for this or that capability. We had to buy licenses for different things at different points in time, not knowing that we could have it bundled initially.

We did evaluate webMethods vs SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). And because we were doing an SAP implementation and SAP had its own middleware tool, we evaluated SAP Process Integration. There were a couple of others. But overall, in terms of the EDI capabilities specifically, because we were mainly looking for the EDI, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stood out.

Training, of course, is really important. Get trained on the tool. If we could have used some of the consulting from SEEBURGER for the initial implementation, we could have learned best practices. Because now, when we go back and look at some of the EDI maps that we developed, now that we are experienced, we say, "Okay, we could have done it in a different way or in a better way." If you get that help in the very beginning, then you can avoid all that, and do a better design of the overall solution.

In terms of the users, it's basically an IT-supported application. We don't really have any direct business users. We have six or seven IT people who support the system. We have a team of four EDI analysts who mainly do all the EDI implementations and regular day-to-day support. We have an admin team, but we hardly use them. It's only during any restarts or any maintenance that we have to use them. On a day-to-day basis, we have a team of four people who actually provide support on the system.

Regarding extent of its use, as I mentioned earlier, we are using it mainly for EDI. We also do have some other tools in our company that we are currently using for application-to-application and business-to-business integration. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is mainly for EDI-related stuff.

In terms of usage, on a yearly basis, we have an objective where we try to increase the usage of EDI in our company. We reach out to our trading partners and a lot of our customers who are currently not sending documents through EDI. If they are sending orders, or we send invoices to them through, for example, email or fax or another manual method, we reach out to them and ask them if they have the capability so that we can onboard them into EDI. With that campaign, every year we are increasing the usage of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) by at least some 15 to 20 customers.

We have the on-premise solution. We have not used the Landscape Manager feature.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. As I mentioned, we are only using it for EDI. In terms of enterprise application integration, because we already had another tool, we don't even use that; I don't know where SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stands in that. But in terms of EDI, it is a pretty good tool. If I were to just rate it for EDI, I would rate it a ten but, overall, because some of the capabilities that other tools provide, I give it an eight.

We use the product to process for our EDI/B2B platform. It supports various transaction formats including X12, EDIFACT, cXML and xCBL. We also use the product to handle various communication protocols, including AS2, FTP, HTTP and PGP encryption.

The product has the ability to handle high volumes of data efficiently. The front-end has provided us the ability to see issues quickly and is enabled for quick and easy remediation.

• It's hard to single out a single feature. The product has some wonderful aspects to it.
• Mapping Designer provides excellent flexibility.
• BIS front-end provides high visibility.
• IDoc Connector provides seamless connection to our SAP system.

The ability to bind a mapping to an agreement seems a bit clunky. It would be nice to have a better way of navigating to a map name rather than using a drop down list.

More than five years.

It is very stable. It has 99.9 percent uptime.

It is highly scalable.

Technical support has been varied through the years. As SEEBURGER has grown, they have made changes to the tech support area which can be challenging at times. There is room for improvement here, but SEEBURGER is moving in the right direction.

We used the TrustedLink Enterprise (TLE) solution. We switched because the product did not provide all the features that we needed to grow our eCommerce platform. The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was one of a few which provided translation for various formats, communications, and integration into SAP, all under one hood.

The initial set up was done by SEEBURGER consulting. It can be complex due to various factors, such as server settings, database settings, and security settings. 

Having the SEEBURGER consulting team perform the installation alleviates a lot of headaches and ensures a stable system.

We have seen ROI.

The cost of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can be considered high. We have elected to have SEEBURGER consulting do the installation. Licensing could also be considered high. However, one would be hard pressed to find another product that does all that this one does.

We evaluated the Gentran's AI (Application Integrator).

Overall, its an excellent product. I would highly recommend it.

The company has been using the solution for three years now. I have been onboard for one year.

We are using the managed services, which is cloud-based, and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) manages this part for us. We do have a modified or hybrid managed services model. We do our own mapping internally, but everything else is through the cloud and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) services.

SEEBURGER is a global company who offers a presence not only in the United States, but is also international across the globe. They offer world-class services, a 24/7 support model, and managed services.

We are at about 95 percent of a million files a month SLA. We have 99.9 percent uptime with it. We have a pretty good response with it, normally under four hours, and that is if there is an issue at all.

The platform has been very consistent and responsive.

We haven't had any issues with it. I've worked very hard to address any gaps which were in place when I came onboard. Therefore, we have been pleased with it.

The platform, Business Integration Suite (BIS), is a multi-component platform which offers more than just ADI. It has components with WebEDI, manages file transfer, and some other areas as well. We've been able to have a high volume system, though probably not as high volume as some of the eCommerce organizations, but we're getting up there. 

It is flexible when adding integrations. We have a cloud-based service. When adding integrations, it is a single point of access. Therefore, we are looking at expanding and using additional functionality with their BIS platform. I don't foresee any additional issues with this. It is just working out the connectivity with the integration points. We are going an SAP implementation with the next version of their portal, which will need some connectivity and functionality as well.

Their traditional model is a vendor flow. We are looking to do a customer-based flow, which which require significant development from SEEBURGER. We are working with them to do this using their WebEDI. It is a brand new area for them, but it could be an option in the future.

One to three years.

The stability is world-class. It is as good as any of the other options out there. They have addressed hiccups quickly, professionally, and with an excellent response.

The scalability is world-class. We are pretty high-end and have a good deal of throughput second. 

We have a lean team using the platform, as we have under six using it now. We do have a European presence as well, which is currently under discussion. We are probably molding to a single global team at this point.

Technical support team's response time is excellent. I have had no complaints.

The company was using an IBM platform.

It was the next step away (replacement) from the previous ADI platform that we were using. While I was not onboard at that time, from what I understand, an extensive review was done, not only with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but with other platforms which they were using with IBM in-house models. The result of that review, including testing, was that they decided and settled on SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

SEEBURGER did the mapping development and all the setup. If I been onboard at that time, I probably would've managed it differently so the team would have received a bit more experience. However, there were some time-sensitive project deadlines and project metrics involved with it, so they were able to leverage SEEBURGER's expertise and consulting services in getting maps from the previous platform over and developed. Now, I don't know exactly the time frame for it, but I didn't hear any negative feedback, so I would say it went seamlessly.

For deployment and maintenance, our company runs very lean. We run with a team of about three. This will probably change, but right now everybody sort of does everything.

I did a review of other options out there, as we moved into the future and our SAP implementation, that this would be the right solution. It was very comparable to other manage services out there. Thus, there wasn't any clear-cut reason to go in another direction.

I've been onboard a year now. I revisited our review of competing platforms. All of them had their pluses and minuses. It came down to dollars and cents, especially when we are about to start an SAP implementation.

We plan to increase platform usage by 25 to 30 percent over the next six to 12 months. This does not even include the WebEDI, which would probably add another 25 percent.

We are not utilizing the Business Integration Suite (BIS) platform to its fullest capacity and functionality.