Supply Chain E-Procurement Application: An example of B2B Integration

I work with our company’s enterprise e-procurement solution, which I will refer to as E-Market (not actual name). This is an excellent example of B2B integration because it involves not only the company I work for and the software vendor of the E-Market product but it also involves each of the product vendors that we purchase products from. I will attempt to explain overall how this product works in the real world and who are the important players in the process.

Below I have an architectural diagram of the systems and people that are involved:



(click on image above to enlarge)

End User Experience
I will start first with the end user. They log onto the E-Market application via the web on their local machine. After logging into E-Market the user is able to purchase items from the different product vendor’s websites (i.e. Staples, Dell, Office Depot) through what is known as ‘PunchOuts’. To the end user the user interface for selecting the products from the different product vendor’s websites looks almost the exact same as if the user logged directly into the product vendor’s websites without going through the E-Market application. However the difference is that once the user has selected all of the items and hit submit, instead of that order being sent to the product vendor…all of the information is actually transferred back into the E-Market application for final processing (i.e. selecting payment method, shipping location, approvers of the order if necessary, etc.). After the user has finished entering all the necessary information into E-Market the order is submitted, and the user’s work for the order is done. Then the order is submitted to the product vendor. The End user may speak to the Application Support if they are having issues or may speak with the Supply Chain Department about potential product vendors that can be added as 'PunchOuts'.

Application Support for E-Market Web Server/Database
This person is responsible for the upkeep of the E-Market web server and making sure that the system is always up and running and can provide support to the end user as well. Responsibilities also include applying any patches or updates to the physical systems and applications provided from the software vendor of the E-Market application. The physical systems can either reside on-site at the company who uses the E-Market software or the software vendor of the E-Market application can host the company’s web/database systems. The latter option introduces the possibility of cloud-computing.

Software Vendor of E-Market Application
The software vendor is responsible for the complete software life-cycle of the E-Market product. They are the ones that provide the updates and patches to the ‘Application Support’ of the system to be applied. If the system is hosted then the software vendor will both provide and apply the patches. The software vendor of the E-Market application not only works with the ‘Application Support’ for providing the fix but more importantly they work with the product vendors whose websites are visited by the end users. This is truly where the B2B work is done. The software and product vendors must work together to establish standards that will be used to address communication protocols between the systems (E-market system and product vendor’s systems). Within the procurement purchasing process some of the following standards are used:

XSL – standard for the documents that are sent between the systems (contain purchase information such as description of items ordered, quantity of items ordered, price of items ordered, etc.)
cXML – standard protocol used for the communication of data between the systems.

Product Vendors (i.e. Staples, Office Depot, Dell)
These vendors work with both the vendor of the E-Market Software as well as the Supply Chain department representatives of the company that uses the E-Market Software. The first relationship (product vendors <-> E-Market software vendor) was described just previously. The second relationship (product vendor <-> Supply Chain Department) is primarily in place to agree on which product vendors will be available to the end users. This can be driven by request from end users to add certain product vendors or can come between relationships of the Supply Chain department and product vendors. Interestingly enough this is another point of strong B2B integration. This gives both the product vendor and the company using the E-Market software insight to each other’s processing patterns. This will help understand how much money or how many transactions are occurring in particular with which product vendors and with which specific end users. This is important for both the company (to strike better deals on products) and the product vendor (to understand customer demand), as well as a host of other items that can improve on the overall efficiency of supply chain management.

References:

cXML ORG (Excellent reference to discuss more on the standards/protocols used. This also defines some of the words used above.)
Wikipedia: E-procurement (General background on e-procurement).