Onboarding new B2B trading partners – how complicated can it be?

One of the main challenges when it comes to B2B projects is the notion of onboarding new trading partners. I will not touch here on the technical mappingchallenges but on the management challenges of the onboarding process.

Who are the stakeholders and what do they entail?

Let’s have a quick look at the different internal and external stakeholders that are part of an onboarding process.

• The integration team responsible for implementing the technical integration,
• The operations team responsible for opening the enterprise firewalls to establish connectivity to/from the trading partner
• The business users responsible for defining and testing the implemented B2B integration
• A number of other backend application owners to which the B2B integration links with the trading partner (for example, the ERP team)

 

This has to be multiplied by two since the same stake holders must be involved from the side of the trading partner, as well.  In addition, for every new trading partner, there are a bunch of documents (mappings specifications, certificates and more) related to the onboarding process.

Although it can be simple technically, the onboarding process can be a lengthy project if not managed in the right way, because of the number of stakeholders and the alignment effort between them.

 

OK, so then what? How should we address onboarding?

Examining the above points, it is clear that there should be a clear methodology and practice vis-à-vis onboarding new trading partners.

From our experience at A.B Link Consulting, there are few do’s and don’ts when it comes to onboarding.

• Set clear timelines with your trading partners – All stakeholders, especially your trading partners must be aligned with clear timelines and milestones related to the onboarding process (testing, production rollout, and more).

• Parallelize your onboarding processes – You do not want to get stuck with an on boarding process that lasts forever, just because your trading partner has different priorities. What you would want to do is to parallelize the onboarding process and have a few processes (at least three) executed at the same time. Of course, the onboarding process that you define has to enable running parallel processes.

• Set an organizational process to support onboarding –  The process must have clear steps and responsibilities of the different onboarding tasks. One of the most recommended approaches is to create a virtual team with representatives from all different departments that will work together on the onboarding process. This will allow simple collaboration and alignment.

• • Engage business users in the onboarding – Business users are a crucial part of the onboarding process. They should be engaged in different parts of the process. For example, in the supply chain, the retailer’s buyers should decide on the business aspects of the exchange with its suppliers. Questions such as can the supplier cancel an order or can the supplier split an order line (and so on) need to be addressed by business users.

In addition, very often, business users are responsible for conducting end-to-end testing, once the implementation is done.

 

• Don’t manage onboarding through emails –Onboarding should be handled like a mini project. I do not advise to use an overkill project management application (like MS Project), but there should be light-weight project management tools to streamline your onboarding processes. Informatica B2B Data Exchange has an Onboarding checklist module that facilitates light weight onboarding management functionalities that are needed.

“Managing” the onboarding via emails only will not allow you to scale, parallelize, or store related documents, etc.

To summarize, onboarding is definitely not only about technical challenges. A quick and efficient onboarding process requires a defined organizational process with clear responsibilities and milestones. A B2B Onboarding Project can be viewed as a series of small-scale subprojects where every partner is a subproject that needs to be executed in parallel. Each subproject has its unique flavors. The process at a high level, however, remains the same and is duplicated throughout. As a result, an onboarding checklist module as offered by Informatica B2B Data Exchange can be sufficient for managing the onboarding.