If we were going to jump a major version, which effectively would be an upgrade, then we would get a SEEBURGER guy in. One thing we have found over the years is that we probably do need to keep in contact with their consultants a bit more, checking with them occasionally just to make sure that we're not doing something that has been discovered as being not the ideal solution. We've been tripped up a couple of times with that. That's just something we've learned.

We had a consultant in this year to be able to install some new aspects of the system. We will probably get them in next year to go through a review of the system to make sure that we are currently doing everything as they would recommend. They do seem to change their recommendations but don't actually get in touch with us about them sometimes.

We're having to manage them, or certainly will, going forward.

Our IT department installed the solution. It took them a couple of hours to implement the solution. We did not have any implementors assist us. It was done in-house. 

A third party assisted in the initial setup.

The solution's initial deployment would take two to three days.

We work with business partners for the communication product goals. 

If any of our partners have AS2 capabilities, we just go and connect them directly. There is no third-party between our ERP Solution and SEEBURGER BIS. It works seamlessly, and we need any third-party applications.

We had someone from SEEBURGER come out and show us the mapper in November and February. 

SEEBURGER came in to install it. There were probably three or four people involved from the SEEBURGER side along with two people from our California team.

Today, the California team is going to show me how to install a new AS2 certificate.

For our first implementation, we asked SEEBURGER to do all of the work for us. I gave them all of my sample files, and all of my specs, and they took care of all of it for me. I concentrated on inbound first and then outbound, as per normal. After that, I would check the flow-through to see that the data went where I expected it to.

In that implementation, they did 75% of the work, and I only did 25% because I was rolling out SAP. I was in charge of two plants at the time, so I couldn't do EDI all by myself. All of the departments were rolled out and they did all of it for us. The support was perfect and it was exactly what I needed.

In 2018 or 2019, we moved back to an on-premises deployment. At that point, they were able to assign the connection guy to us and then one person for the maps. He took care of double-checking and finding a way to merge the current on-premises and our former cloud processes together for us.

At that point, I was able to assist a lot more because I could concentrate on the EDI, and I also had a colleague in Germany that could work with me. That time, it was more a 50/50 process, with us helping to deploy it. We started on January 1st, and we went live with that merge on April 1st. It was a little bit longer of an implementation move but we weren't as desperate for a start date. Overall, we had no issues moving from the cloud back to on-premises.

The US SEEBURGER staff were fantastic with the second one. When we found out that our implementation was not going to work on the German one, because somebody forgot to sign us up on our side, the American people stepped in. They were able to get me up and running with about two months of prep, and then a bit more because I needed them to help me more than they should have had to help me for the summer that year.

It is unheard of to get that many customers up and running as fast as they did for us.

I will be in charge of maintenance when it's time, but I will steal somebody from my operations IT team to assist me with that. Other than making new maps, to this point, there has been no real maintenance that we've been doing.

We worked directly with SEEBURGER. I have quite a lot of EDI experience so I understood quite a lot of it and that may have helped.

We used SEEBURGER consulting. We already had one instance in Europe. North America had to get its own instance and I was in charge of making sure that that happened: getting it installed, explaining to the consultant that these are all the flows we have today, and these are all the software components we have today. How do we put all that stuff into one box?

Our experience with them was very good. The person that we used is still with the company.

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.

We did it directly with SEEBURGER.

The relationship started in late 2012 to early 2013. It didn't actually get put into production for usage until 2014, so there was a year to a year and a half of planning that went on between the staff at SEEBURGER and the staff at my organization, from the infrastructure and the integration teams, to try to lay out how it needed to be installed as well as what kind of machines were needed and how much memory. That was a long, drawn-out process. I wasn't here at the time, but I imagine it wasn't the highest priority here at the time. So, there was a good period of time when they were just in that discovery mode trying to understand what they wanted to buy, for example:

• What would we need to install it? 
• What team was going to support it? 
• Were we going to outsource it to a managed services provider? 
• Were we going to hire a staff to do it internally? 

All that type of stuff had to be worked out in advance, so there was a lot of planning that went into it.

They went with an outsource managed services provider at the start because they needed staff quickly to be able to start on the migration work to get all the integrations understood as well as out of the old software and into the new one. There is always this learning when you go full-on managed services, as you don't get high levels of expertise. You mostly get people who can turn stuff around quickly without thinking about it too much. Then, towards the end is when they hired a couple others and me to try to get some more senior staff in to steer the ship and standardize everything that had been configured so far as well as come up with design patterns. So, towards the tail end is when they hired some senior developers to try to get things under control and standardize use cases.

During the migration, because it was a managed services provider, there were a whole lot of resources involved during the big part of the migration, like maybe 20 people just cranking out and moving stuff from the old systems to the new system. As things got closer to being migrated, we got down to a team of four or five people. There was a bit of managed services assistance offshore to kind of help out off-hours, and that has not really changed a whole lot. There are four or five individuals who handle the bulk of operational aspects and support as well as the engineering aspects, so it is a pretty small team.

We worked with SEEBURGER employees.

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.

A lot of the third-party service providers did not have knowledge of this product. We use Accenture as our core SME but they did not have knowledge of, or skillsets in, this product. We had to work with the vendor, hire their Professional Services to do the architecture, do the installation, and to train our engineers on the solution. There was a lot of learning curve there and we spent a lot of time and money with SEEBURGER Professional Services to get to that point.

At this point, we let SEEBURGER make the decision on upgrades. We don't decide which version we're using, because they support the system. What we're planning to do, because of COVID-19 and internal priorities, is go to iPaaS.

I have a team of two analysts. On their side, I have two points of contact: One person who works on the day-to-day and process side of things and another person who works on the maps.

SEEBURGER installed the latest version.

We accepted the help of the SEEBURGER team, making it a typical software setup and installation process.

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

We deal with SEEBURGER directly and they tend to do the development work on their systems for us. For recurring development work, they will do that on our behalf.

There are some third-parties involved who tend to be geographic specific and use different EDI formats. We are required in some cases when dealing with other parts of the world for EDI to go through a separate bureau. There's little we can do about that since it is just a data exchange format.

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.

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 generally work with SEEBURGER. Once, when we had a lot of work to do, we did use a Polish company. I don't remember their name. We used them for a short period.

Finding SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) expertise is very hard. There isn't much SEEBURGER expertise in the UK. I don't think many major organizations are using it in the UK. I know they have very big customers in the US and Germany.

We used SEEBURGER training directly.