SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

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.

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. 

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. 

• Ability to have one system that can handle any protocol: One of the strongest features
• No need to have multiple systems for different types of communication protocols
• The software can run on any platform: Makes it very flexible

We minimized our complexity and decreased the number of systems to communicate with our partners. These are the biggest advantages that yield cost savings.

Everything now is centralized. This platform is the gate to our suppliers and customers.

• The interface and logging of messages could be more simplified. Everything is in Java and uses hash codes or UUID codes. This sometimes makes it very hard to know what has happened or what issue you might have.
• They could fix their protocol adapters so they really work with each OEM. Although it is sold with the OEM tag, you have to configure it to make it work as required.
• They tend to release a lot of service packs throughout the year, always fixing bugs that other customers report. It is as though they are building the system as time moves forward and providing enhancements.
• Monitoring of the application is very poor. You have to make custom scripts to monitor what is really important.

I’ve been using the solution for seven years.

We had issues with stability. The system is not always stable and you could have a problem at any time without notice. I think they develop it more for Linux based platforms which I hear are stable. However, we are an AIX shop, unfortunately.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. The architecture of their software and solutions is very scalable on paper. If your network cannot handle their requirements, they will offer other ideas that will work. Thumbs up on that part.

Everything is done though a ticket system. It works with a few ping-pongs of emails. The support team is knowledgeable about their product and they are always looking to help you.

During an emergency, however, I would expect:

• A higher level of support
• Help from someone who can speak English very well
• Assistance from someone who is in our own time zone: The support center is centralized

Prior to our SAP installation, we had a simple system to send data though a product called ECQ from Compuware. That product no longer exists, as far as I know. It was not very robust in terms of where we were headed in the future.

The training you receive is not that great. A lot of it is self-taught. They could do a better job of explaining the inner workings of the logic used, so that one can relate to what is going on.

It was more about learning the system and how it operates with a separate database (Oracle) in our case. You have to know very well what kind of transactions you will do, how frequently, and what volumes are going to come to the system.

The licensing model is fair. You normally get a production license along with a stand-by license and a test/QA license for testing. The customer can be flexible to some degree on licensing.

Pricing is somewhat expensive for what the system is doing. There are cheaper solutions on the market, but they might not cover everything you need under one roof.

I was not involved in evaluating other options.

Do your research as to what your needs are with regard to both technical and business flows.

If the monitoring and debugging of flows is key, then you really want to get a demo. See how the system functions and if your team can understand it.

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.

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.

It's our EDI translator. We use it daily, it's on-prem. It's SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 and we've been using it for eight or nine years.

We run 60 to 75 different customers, large OEMs which have between five and 15 different sites each, and every site could be a $100 million to $200 million company with its own computer system, its own EDI. In essence, our 60 to 75 customers are really several hundred customers, all sending different EDI data to us.

We use the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) platform to translate sales orders or sales schedules or planning schedules into EDI data that our ERP system can ingest. When we, in many cases, ship daily to these customers, we take our shipping data and send them an ASN and an invoice all translated through the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 software. I'd estimate it's in the hundreds of shipments per day.

It's a standard inbound gateway and a standard outbound process and it does everything we need it to do.

They were a strategic partner of the Infor Global Solutions and were a recommended EDI solution, ten years ago, for the ERP software we use from Infor called Baan.

It seems to be a very powerful mapping tool and we haven't found that it can't do what we need it to do in the EDI world, and that world is quite daunting when you think of all these customers, these OEMs, with legacy systems that have unique requirements. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) mapper can handle it because it's very powerful with logic built in.

The solution is very stable.

In terms of scalability, that's why we're going to the cloud, so we have global scale. In and of itself, I could do many more hundreds of customers through the on-prem solution, but that's not where my company's growth is. We want to use this same solution in Asia and not have something different feeding the factories there, so that's why we are moving to the cloud offering.

We use their consultant services and they're excellent.

We used their competitor. This product does the same thing that the previous product did, ten years ago. But the competitor said they were going to stop doing business and supporting the Baan ERP system. So we had to switch and we selected SEEBURGER because they were a recommended EDI partner with Baan software. We migrated all of our EDI maps to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), from their competition, and then we had to modify them, ever so slightly, to get them to work.

I'm sure the product is set up in a straightforward way. The maps that we set up per customer or per customer's site are all customized. That's where the complexity is. The complexity is the not in the product. There is certainly a learning curve for becoming an expert mapper and using the tool to do the maps, but the software in and of itself is not complicated.

We did our deployment gradually because we couldn't handle the "big bang," so we did it in six to nine months. We had all those maps in existence in another tool and we had to migrate them and then get them all working individually. We had several hundred maps to do and we did them over six to nine months. Our strategy was a slow cut-over as we tested each map using the new software.

We used SEEBURGER training directly.

The pricing seems to be competitive and the maintenance is standard.

We went with the preferred, recommended EVI translator that Infor recommended.

We are now considering using the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) solution, the exact same one, in the SEEBURGER Cloud, meaning we are not going to have it on-prem and we're going to have them do the transport and the translation to us and then send the EDI data, so we don't have to manage the server on-premise. It's the same basic concept but it's slightly more robust having them manage the maintenance of the system.

We are 99 percent sure we're moving to their cloud and that would give us the stability and scalability that we need, so we can have that same process work globally and not just be reliant on our one on-premise instance. The strategy of moving to their cloud is for both of those reasons. So the product in and of itself, on-prem, does not give you that, but the same product, in their data centers around the world, allows me to do the same functions but where I need it. We're going to the cloud in the next three to six months because of scalability, because of global reach, and standardization.

We have one user of the software and their role is the mapping development and the day-to-day coordination of changes. They monitor the flow in and make changes as needed, based on customer maps: a new map request, a new customer, or new sites. That same person also does the maintenance and the deployment. I'm looking to have the same tool globally and I will be able to contract people to do it in Asia, since they speak a different language. I will contract SEEBURGER consultants to do that for me.

I don't know if we're using the Landscape Manager and I don't think we take advantage of any Active-Active in terms of handling larger loads, as we have one instance. It's not multiple and it's not their Cloud Services, it's the on-prem SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) 6 platform.

In terms of its flexibility, when it comes to adding integrations, it's not that kind of setup for us. We don't integrate into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We use the tools and the mapping, Workbench, as it's presented, and send the EDI information off to our ERP system. We don't take advantage of integrations.

I would rate it at eight out of ten because the current tool is planned to be moved to the cloud so we are not looking to switch. We are looking to scale it globally, so we are pretty happy with it.

We really appreciated the solution itself (EDI transaction processor) and the Developer Studio. Ninety per cent of our sales order processing is automated through our SB BIS 6 system.

We have enjoyed high performance and only had a few problems. The Developer Studio and the debugging tools were easy to use. We could not function without an EDI system and SB BIS 6 is our chosen EDI system.

Error messages in the main area that could be better, but you can say that about any product.

The Front-End Monitoring tool part of Seeburger BIS 6, is a Java Web Start-based application. When a map (or transaction) fails, the errors go to a special section in monitoring, which is good. However, a lot of the times, when you are looking at the failure, it's one of those long Java.class failure descriptions. A lot of the times, in order to locate the error, you have to download the input data to your workstation, load the map that failed in your Seeburger BIS Developer Studio tool, run it there and then, debug it so as to locate the error.

One thing Seeburger BIS 6 is really good at, is enforcing standards (such as X12, EDIFACT, etc.) but, this can also bite you. When partners don't follow the standards, then the actual standard that is violated, doesn't necessarily jump at you in the Monitoring tool. You have to debug the data received and the map. This is from my experience with many tools, especially those built on Java. This kind of thing is not specific to Seeburger BIS, in my experience.

We have used the product for five years.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

Technical support was pretty good and had a fast turnaround.

We needed to upgrade our previous EDI tool. That tool did not have a migration path. We looked at many EDI tools and chose SB BIS as the best one available.

I won't lie. The setup and the configuration were both complex because it is a powerful tool.

The biggest complexity was one of the biggest benefits. Namely, you can run SB BIS components on multiple inter-connected servers, which we do.

I'm a developer, so I don't know about pricing.

No comment. We chose what we thought was the best.

SB BIS is hard to beat if you:

• Process thousands of transactions a day
• Do business in more than one country
• If you are an SAP shop

We are an SAP shop and SB BIS meshes very well with SAP. They are both German companies. I think both of their respective headquarters are located physically close to each other in Germany.

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.

The ease-of-use is absolutely amazing. What I mean is that even if you’ve never worked with their software before, it’s very easy to understand and start working with it and move on to more complex things.

The ability to design and create your own business processes, tailored for your organization’s needs, can be done with the BPM designer.

You can also use your own conversion mappings through the BIC Mapping Designer, which is another piece of complementary software.

This really makes it a whole solution that is ready to satisfy any requirements that your organization might have.

A big improvement was that this platform allowed us to move away from paper data transfer to digital, even with partners who are not EDI ready. This occurred through the use of a partner portal that made the data easily available to them in a digital format.

The advantages of having everything digitalized are clear and they are covered in detail by all EDI solution vendors, so I’m not going to go into that.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment. I would describe it as a very robust solution which is oriented towards ease-of-use. It has small bugs, like any other software, but constant patches and feature add-ons are taking care of that.

The company I work for has been using this solution for six years already, and I have four years of experience with it.

We did have stability issues in the previous version of the software, BIS 6.3.5 Q4. But the newer platform hasn’t shown any issues so far.

At the moment, I would say that we’re not utilizing the platform’s full potential, so a question about scalability is not relevant.

Depending on who is helping you, the level of technical expertise will vary.

As far as the Seeburger consultants that I have dealt with from Seeburger HQ go, I would give them a rating of 8/10.

Frontline support, or first-level support though, gets a rating of 4/10. Most of the time, they seem to be very bad at understanding the critical nature of an issue and they rarely manage to fulfill their own SLAs.

We were using BIS 6.3.5 Q4. The switch was made in order to improve the stability of the solution, as well as to accommodate a higher workload. Also, that platform was reaching its EOL.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. Depending on the amount of data that you need to take with you from the EDI platform that you’re already using, Seeburger also provides consultancy services to help with the transition. Their documentation is easy to read and understand, making the platform easy to setup.

Definitely negotiate. Depending on the size of your organization, you can get some substantial benefits in terms of pricing or services.

Solutions from AMTrix and Microsoft were also taken into consideration.

Even if it’s a good product, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need everything they offer. Make sure to test the platform out beforehand, as well as many other platforms, and try to find the one that best suits your present and future needs.