Once implemented, B2B systems require maintenance and management. Maintenance keeps your system "healthy" and up-to-date. Management enables you to extract the highest return on your investment. Do you have the right team and processes to ensure a world-class B2B system?
Technology Administration |
Process & Firefighting |
|---|---|
| Hardware, integration software, and management tools | Experience, training, and depth of staffing |
| Hardware & Software—Provide support through an experienced operations team in world-class data centers with multiple power feeds, redundant generator backup, offsite back-up and data secured on mirrored RAID storage. | Trading Partner Administration—Keep up with changes made by trading partners to their IT systems. Ensure that your staff has the skills and experience to quickly react to changes. |
| System & Application Administration—Require your IT support staff to be available 24x7 for optimal performance and availability of your B2B system. | Change Management—React to internal IT changes, such as new business processes, networking changes, and ERP upgrades. |
| Upgrades—Keep up with upgrades, patches, and bug fixes. Avoid impacts to day-to-day business activities by scheduling testing, staging, and launch during off-hours. | Error Resolution—Recognize, isolate, and react in a timely manner to errors that originate with a trading partner. |
| Archiving & Reporting—Ensure that you have a system to archive, search, retrieve and report on individual transactions or on program trends as a whole. This is particularly important for regulatory compliance, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. | Exception Management—Ensure that you have the technology and processes to observe "normal" ranges or activities, recognize anomalies, and generate appropriate alerts. |
| High Availability—Engineer your B2B program so that you can continue processing in the event of a hardware or software failure. | Program Management—Ensure your B2B program continues to meet the changing needs of your organization and your trading community. |
| Disaster Recovery—Recover and begin processing again with no loss of momentum after a catastrophic data center failure. Deploy a backup data center physically separate from the primary center. | Order & Process Tracking—Develop visibility across the business processes and the ability to correlate the documents pertinent to the transaction. |