The Importance of Integrating B2B and ERP Platforms in the Automotive Industry

Integration, this is an important word on the minds of many CIOs around the world, and yet many companies underestimate the importance of it, especially when trying to implement and work with countless back office systems. Let me try and compare a company trying to use a mixture of different back office systems to a musical orchestra.

Each musician in an orchestra has their part to play in the musical performance, if one musical instrument is out of tune or a beat is missed for some reason then the audience will notice it straight away. It is no different for a company trying to integrate back office systems, the reason for doing this is to ensure a smooth flow of information around the organization, making sure that the relevant people in the various departments get the right information at the right time. Without backend integration, companies will struggle to orchestrate the flow of information across their extended enterprise. Whilst on the subject of orchestras, this was one of my favourite automotive adverts from last year, which was performed on actual car parts.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been used for many years to manage materials and enterprise resources within a company. Now unless a company makes everything in house, which is very rare these days, companies will have to manage a range of different suppliers and interact with customers on a daily basis. So there is clearly a potential barrier to information flow here, an ERP system is managing the flow of information within a company, but by itself it cannot manage a global network of trading partners as well. There has to be some level of integration so that the barrier can be removed and information can flow freely across the extended enterprise. Imagine being able to utilize ERP related information across your trading partner community, imagine being able to smoothly receive information from trading partners without any re-keying of information or having to interrogate multiple business systems. Integration, CIOs should not under-estimate the power that this word has and outsourcing the management of the B2B to ERP integration process to a trusted partner such as GXS should be given serious consideration.

SAP is the most widely used ERP platform in the automotive industry today, and many companies rely on SAP software to manage their global manufacturing operations. Many European automotive companies, particularly those in Germany, have globalised their manufacturing operations in the past few years. They have established operations in ‘old’ emerging markets such as China, Brazil and India and the ‘new’ emerging markets of Thailand and Vietnam. As the automotive companies stretched their operations around the world it became more important to provide integration to multiple SAP instances and to also provide a means to manage their ever expanding community of trading partners. Ideally, the car companies need to get a single, consolidated view of their resources across their extended enterprise. Providing an integrated B2B and ERP platform allows the automotive companies to improve how they manage inventory levels, trading partner relationships and of course reduce costs across their business.

GXS has worked with many companies over the years to integrate their B2B and SAP ERP platforms, in fact we are currently working with one global automotive tier 1 supplier to integrate 80 instances of SAP that are scattered across their global network of manufacturing plants. As you would expect, we have been able to establish a valuable knowledge base of information associated with integrating our Trading Grid® B2B platform with many SAP installations. However we can offer companies much more than this, let me briefly explain.

• GXS has over 40 years experience of working with companies in the automotive sector, in fact over 70% of the world’s Top 100 automotive suppliers are connected to our Trading Grid infrastructure. GXS can provide seamless SAP integration to a global B2B platform where nearly all the major suppliers already have pre-configured connections to our service
  
• We offer a mapping centre of excellence which provides a centralized location for managing over 30,000 maps. We can also provide support for a number of different SAP IDOC documents, for example SHPMNT03, INVOIC01, DELVRY01, ORDERS01. As you would expect GXS are fully certified by SAP for Netweaver® integrations
  
• We offer support for the broadest set of communication standards in the industry, whether it is mediating between legacy communication protocols or the latest internet communication protocols or indeed FTP over SAP ALE, either way we can make sure that you can connect to your trading partners irrespective of their technical capability
  
• Providing global 24/7, multi-lingual, support services ensures that your trading partners can be on-boarded and supported anywhere in the world. GXS recently acquired Interchange in Brazil which now allows us to work more closely with this important automotive manufacturing region
  
• You would have peace of mind knowing that your SAP implementation would be integrated to one of the most modern and highly available B2B infrastructures in the world. This means that your global instances of SAP would be connected to a future proof B2B infrastructure that has the flexibility to grow as your company grows
  

Now I have only scratched the surface here and in future blog entries I will cover each of the above in more detail and explain how they help contribute to the smooth integration of many ERP related back office environments around the world. For further information on how GXS Managed Services can help your company, please click here >>>