Where application integration connects systems inside one company, B2B integration crosses company boundaries. It covers the connections themselves (EDI, APIs, AS2, SFTP), the translation between each trading partner’s format and your own, and the management of a community of trading partners with different capabilities and requirements.
A complete B2B integration program usually includes several layers of work beyond the connection itself. Gaps in any one of them tend to show up as manual effort, delays or rework somewhere else in the business, often far from the team that owns integration:
- connectivity and protocol management
- mapping and translation to your ERP, WMS and TMS
- trading partner onboarding, testing and certification
- monitoring, error handling and support
- channels for trading partners that don’t use EDI or APIs
The hardest part is usually not technology. It is coverage and quality: getting every supplier, customer, carrier and warehouse connected, and making sure what they send is complete and correct. Traditional B2B integration confirms that a document was delivered; it rarely confirms that the quantity, price or ship date matches the order.