SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

We use the solution to tap and transform traffic. 

The tool's performance doesn't get affected by transformation loads. You can write any number of rules, filtering criteria, transformations, etc. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite does not have an end user or subscriber console which can show the traffic status. You have to be reliant on the consultants to do the customization. 

I have been working with the product for three and a half years. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is scalable. 

The tool's installation was easy. 

I would rate SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use it for standard EDI practice forecasts, firms, ASNs, invoices, etc. We use everything here, including VDA, EDIFACT, and ANSI, but we are also now having our customers send us drawing files, and then we're sending them off to our engineers.

Our business has grown to have 14 major customers, which implies orders of greater than 200 parts per customer. If we include ship-to then we're probably talking closer to 50 new customers that have moved to EDI. I don't think we would have made it through the pandemic, to be honest, without this.

I have a tiny team in Spain that was entering every one of those requirements manually until we switched over to SEEBURGER, and then we could get them added pretty quickly. Now, for the first time in our history, we are adding Asian customers. Branches in India and China are starting to get EDI started, which has never happened before.

BIS provides me with everything in a unified platform and I haven't needed to add any third-party solutions. 

This product helps us to automate processes. Previously, we would have normally manually entered requirements and now, we just let it read them in automatically. As an example, just one customer with a 200 part requirement that goes out over 12 months would normally have taken my team two hours per week, just to enter the requirements. Now, it just happens and there is no work required at all from the team. In this regard, it has absolutely helped us to increase efficiency. 

At this point, automation hasn't led us to reduce the number of employees that we have. As such, I don't think that we've decreased any of our costs. 

SEEBURGER has helped us to enable digital business transformation. Every time we add a new customer, there is a digital footprint. This is no longer a manual process.

The fact that BIS is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment is very important because it means that we could take from one to the other. That is amazing.

The product somewhat helps to future-proof our business. I can add new adapters, for example. We're strictly on EDI and I know that they have more offerings than that, but we have not moved past it yet. Certainly, they are not stopping with EDI, which is good.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to make changes on-premises, without having to contact SEEBURGER. It allowed me to work on my timeframes, which is important because if I didn't hear back from a customer then it wasn't wasting SEEBURGER's time. I'm able to work more independently. 

The cost models have room for improvement. There are different licensing models between Europe and the USA, which is something that I don't understand. This is an aspect that needs to be improved.

Java is very old technology and they should move away from it, to anything that's better.

We have been using SEEBURGER since July 1st, 2017, four years ago.

With our on-premises implementation, we never had any issues with uptime or stability.

Scalability-wise, I don't know of any limits for us, so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

At this point, we only have two users, although we need to enlarge that role. I am responsible for the customer setup, connection setup, and map design. My other colleague also does customer setup and communication setup, but no map design.

We plan on expanding our usage because we're going to start moving our Asian colleagues. As soon as we find a customer that's able to do EDI with them, we will turn it on. We're certainly increasing in that world.

We now approach every customer and look for EDI opportunities. Now that we've determined that we can handle receiving CAD-type drawings through it, we are going to send that to different plants. We certainly plan on using it more, and I know due to COVID, we've never experienced the number of customers asking us for EDIs as we are now.

With respect to support, it's best-of-breed for me. I still get to work with my American counterparts at SEEBURGER, but my contract is in Europe. When I do need true support, I tend to get most of it from America, so that works in my time zone. Alternatively, when I use the service desk, it's support from the European side.

I like working with the SEEBURGER support. The service desk itself now has a chat, and that has saved me days because they answer the question right when I was on the phone with them, or on chat. That's been amazing. The service desk is always helpful. I'd say 95% of the time, I only have to use the service desk, which is included in our maintenance.

With my support in America, I have one particular person that the emails go to. Unless it's a big issue, he usually has an answer back out to me that day, so costing me far less than if it had to go to other areas. It's been a dream.

Everywhere in the world used something different before SEEBURGER.

In our American offices, we used TrustedLink, whereas, in Canada, we used Atos. In Europe, they used other packages. In Spain, for example, they used their own desktop version for EDI integration. We have also used SAP PI and others.

I don't know why we switched to the current solutions but it was done in conjunction with our SAP rollout.

In this IT world, it would be classified as quite straightforward.

In America in 2017, we started with a cloud-based deployment. Since then, we have migrated everything to an on-premises server in Europe. At the time, we went with a single point of communication, so we were only using OFTP2 when we started. It was a single server install. 

When it comes to our mappings, we've gotten very complex, especially because we merged the two. It is relevant to note that we have a two-stage implementation. At first, when it was just for Germany, I don't know that it was classified as very complex. When it was just for the USA, it was not classified as very complex. But when you blended the two, we added a lot more complexity to our world. Every process is broken down as "Is this a US EDI or is this European EDI?"

Effectively, we doubled our complexity at that point.

I don't know the original German timeframe but for the US implementation, it took a little more than two months to deploy.

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 do not have exact figures for ROI at the moment but the one example, where we take two hours per week down to zero, is priceless right now.

I wasn't involved in the contract negotiations, but I can say that we pay per site. It is based on the expected usage per month. I would like to find a way to change this and not pay per site because I don't want to pay for a site that has one EDI turned on, and pay the same amount for them.

We pay for a maximum number of setups, then we pay per customer map, and we pay maintenance on each one of those. BIS provides the flexibility to pay as you grow. The price of each customer map is €200 and the hourly rate for maintenance is fairly reasonable.

We budgeted for ten days of maintenance at €160 per hour, for a total of €12,000. We purchased the block so that we wouldn't have to pause our operations but we hardly use it. That contract started in 2019 and we've barely made a dent in it.

I highly recommend that people negotiate strong and hard on their customer map contract. I've decreased our European one in half, and I still will fight to get it down again. I prefer the pricing model out of the USA by far. There is a significant difference between these two pricing models, which is something that I don't understand.

As part of our monitoring, we run checks to see if we're close to where we expect to stay in terms of usage.

In addition, you have to buy each adaptor that you're going to use. These include OFTP2, AS2, SFTP, and others. I highly recommend that you figure out your market and pick the best one for your marketplace, instead of paying for all of them.

We did evaluate other options in 2015, although I can't recall the names of the products.

I am not running the most recent version because I don't have a test environment, so I don't want to upgrade and risk things breaking before I can test it. The plan is to move to version 6.7 in the fall, meaning that I'd be skipping a version. The most compelling reason to adopt the new version is the security. It has a higher security rating than the current one. Also, new tools are available that I want to take advantage of.

BIS could provide real-time data insight for our organization but at this time, we're not using it in that format.

At this point, using this solution has not helped us to decrease the time to market. We're probably too far out in the company to do that. I don't have any customers that are taking business faster because we can do EDI. In fact, most of my customers are the reason that we're not moving faster for EDI.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to fully understand the differences between the on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions. Also, start negotiating early, especially if you have to do your negotiating in Europe. In America, they're much more flexible. You should definitely start earlier than we did because we were far too late.

The biggest lesson that I learned when using this product had to do with designing my own process maps. It is important to learn the map DB system because you can make it very strong and it makes your life much more flexible. For example, you can have a colleague that never has to touch a design or make changes because you put it into a process map instead. They can just use it within a table and never open the designer. It's fabulous. I would concentrate on getting the most knowledge out of that as a could and in fact, it's still what I've written down for my self-design training sessions that I ask them to do for me.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for any kind of integration, but mainly in the areas of B2B, A2A and API, and even data-lake related topics. We do not have any limitations in using it, so if a special integration demand arises outside the integration patterns described, we can be sure that it is always possible.

It's a hybrid. Some parts are on-premises and other parts in the SEEBURGER Cloud.

On the one hand, when we are talking about classic integration like EDI, we have countries in which we do a high percentrage of our revenue with B2B. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides significant value in handling such things in an automated way. All the automation features are quite important. But even if partners ask us to provide integration capabilities, we are able to meet their demands. When customers ask us, we don't generally need to decline.

With the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we can deal with each and every demand, whether it is EDI, or the customer or partner wants to have another type of interface with no direct relation to EDI, or even modern approaches like APIs. When a customer or partner asks us to provide an API on their side, while our internal components are not API-ready, the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can make them API-ready. Think of an SAP IDoc. You can take it, you can translate it to an API-related data format, and communicate with an API. To the outside, no one would recognize that this is coming from an old-fashioned IDoc.

The solution also helps us automate processes completely. All of the processes inside SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) are made for doing a concept, doing a setup, doing a test and then, usually, you no longer have to touch them. That means it's fully automated, either by a task scheduler, or even better, by events. Whenever someone from the outside is sending data, it could be fully and automatically booked in the remote system. Or when we're picking up a mailbox, it is done with a scheduled job within the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), and the data will be processed completely without touching it.

The automation has definitely helped to reduce our costs. For example, in the automation of interfaces, EDI is the biggest portion. It's a significant KPI in the majority of the countries in which OSRAM, our company, is working. Sales automation quota is usually part of the management reporting and should indicate how many interfaces and how many documents can be booked completely without touching them, and as a result, free up resources to support business partners more. Some years ago, a calculation said, that a person in a customer service center could handle between 60,000 up to 100,000 sales orders per year, when keying them in manually. With data-driven sales automation you can free people, to care about more individual requests, and generate leads more effectively than ever before.

It also helps us to keep up to date on regulatory requirements, from two angles. On the one hand, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has an evergreen approach, so you do not really need to do updates. You do service packs or hotfixes all the time so you do not have to do a huge update project. Service packs also come with new functionality. For example, some years ago, OFTP1 over dial-up lines was replaced by OFTP2 over IP-based lines or internet traffic. This was then the default that came with one of the next service packs. On top of that, SEEBURGER is asking their customers what they need. It is not only about what SEEBURGER thinks the customer needs. You can give them input. If you tell them that new technology might come up, they see if it can be a part of the next service pack.

Another benefit is that it has helped to decrease time to market in our business. Whenever we receive a request from our project teams, usually within a few minutes we can set up an API. When we receive a request, we schedule it, of course, because our calendars are full of topics, but if you want to create an interface like an API, it can be completely done within a few minutes.

One of the most valuable features is the option to have all integration patterns constantly updated in one platform. That is the main strength I see in using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It means I can use a very old-fashioned integration pattern, combined with a very modern integration pattern. There are no limitations in terms of combining components because all the components simply fit together.

SEEBURGER's support for multiple integration patterns makes it the best choice. I know many integration solutions, but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is the only one with such a huge catalog of options that you can use out-of-the-box and use as plug-and-play.

All the topics we've identified have been placed on the SEEBURGER roadmap already. Our company is part of the SEEBURGER customer advisory board where some customers have been asked to give feedback. We give very open feedback to SEEBURGER, telling them what is not working properly. And all of our topics are already on the roadmap. They are close to their customers and try to fulfill their needs. Whatever needs to be improved will be there within one of the next service packs.

Among the things we have requested are improvements in the user interface and improvements that would be implemented by completely new modules or improvements in their Cloud Services. For example, because we are a global-facing company, we've recognized that we not only need some well-known e-invoicing mechanisms available over the SEEBURGER Cloud, but we need many. Even if there are smaller ones which are not well-known, the expectation is that SEEBURGER can provide them to us. SEEBURGER responded to that demand and provided services for countries where they've not had this before. The feedback on usability topics has been converted by SEEBURGER into improvements. We see them coming, step-wise, with each and every service pack.

We have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for nearly 20 years.

The stability depends on what you need. We are operating a module so called Active-Active, together with the DataStore. The Active-Active component takes care of allowing multiple machines to work as a type of cluster and they can replace each other. If you have multiple machines or multiple nodes on which Active-Active is running, you can distribute the traffic to all of them. Say you have two machines with the Active-Active extension, and you have to restart one because of operating system updates. The other machine can completely take over.

The interesting thing is that this is done based on the transaction level of your processing. While operating system-based mirroring or database or storage-based mirroring are always done on a purely technical level, with the SEEBURGER Active-Active, a transaction coming in will be registered initially on all nodes. If one node goes down while your file or data is being processed, the other side can make use of the data and continue processing. This way, you can have up to almost 100 percent uptime.

You can even do SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) updates. You can take one site offline, do a service pack update, hotfixes, or configuration changes, and that newer version with the new service pack will be compatible to continue processing with the other node. You can bring it up, wait until processing is distributed to both sides again, and do the service pack update on the other side. You can ensure that you have zero downtime.

I would say the scalability is unlimited because you can add additional nodes in an unlimited way. You have several topics where you can make use of the scalability of the solution. You might have multiple nodes where you are distributing the same activity to multiple computers or VM guest systems. That way, you increase the power of the whole system.

You can even split instances. For example, I want to split user activities done over the front end or user portal, like using an API catalog, from the processing activities, such as translating a file or communicating a file to SAP or to an external partner. That enables me to increase the power for the processing when I do not need additional power for the users. There are multiple modules, the process engine, Adapter Engine, and DataStore, and you can distribute them to several machines and increase them in an unlimited way. What we've heard a few years ago is, that SEEBURGER has tested with 250 instances, meaning there were 250 computers working as one or system, and that might not be the latest test.

We have 300 to 350 people working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but from different areas. We have end-users using it for business monitoring checking the messages exchanged with their partners. It could be a sales person who wants to see which messages have been sent by his customer. We also have developers on the platform developing APIs, as well as the people developing mappings for the B2B activities. There are also administrators, who are mainly part of the department I'm working in. We enable people to make use of integration capabilities. The user interface has been improved drastically over the last few years, and that means they do not always have to ask us, "Can you do this for me?" or "Can you search that for me?" We give them an account and then they can go in and gather the information on their own.

In terms of future-proofing our business, we see that SEEBURGER is fast enough that even our architects receive a satisfying answer. Whenever we ask about, for example, "Can you deal with Docker containers?" or "Can you do API management?" or "Can you do data ingestion for data lake? they have a solution ready. We know that SEEBURGER has invested a lot of effort into research and development. It is not only that they follow what the customers are doing and requesting, but they even prepare for the future. That's interesting for us, because for some topics I was not even aware that SEEBURGER is dealing with that, like Docker or Kubernetes.

If SEEBURGER sees something that is required, things which are not necessarily related to integration, like running a system on a Docker container, or Active-Active, SEEBURGER provides such options to make the customer happy and to ensure that their product is running properly. They make sure they can handle future demands. They do everything to ensure that they are ready for the future.

Even in regard to security, for example, we see that they avoid having security issues or running into issues with outdated software because, with the service packs, they always prepare for future software for new Java versions, or to be ready for new operating systems or new database versions. They always have a roadmap to ensure that there's nothing we can complain about.

We have a 24/7 maintenance and support contract with SEEBURGER, which includes software updates as well as technical support. They take care of the documentation that describes what our company is doing with SEEBURGER and that it is always up to date. Even if the named supporters assigned to our account are not there because I call support on the weekend or at night, another support contact is able to quickly check what our landscape looks and what we are doing.

Their support activities are very precise. A tool they've integrated in their Landscape Manager allows us to automatically provide all that required data to SEEBURGER in one shot. The Landscape Manager acts without any database and without any interdependency with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself. So even if our BIS system has issues, they can do an analysis immediately. The Landscape Manager, with the option to create a support case, is collecting all that information and provides it in the required format to SEEBURGER. Usually, within a short time frame, you have a qualified answer about what is wrong. The knowledge and experience of all their support staff have increased drastically over the last years. Even if there is an issue at night, the chance is nearly 100 percent that a support person can help us immediately.

When we started with SEEBURGER, we used a version called SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Version 5. The setup for that was a little bit complicated. 

With the newer versions, like 6.7, it is easy because they guide you with a lot of wizards and good documentation. If you do a setup now, you can use the BIS Landscape Manager, which is a tool with which you can control your complete landscape. You might have several components inside such a BIS environment. You might add another server, for example, to handle demand. The Landscape Manager is a tool that gives you a full overview of your landscape. From there, you can set up new components. If you book something in addition, you can add it from there. You can do service pack updates. You can install hotfixes from there and all potential third-party components you might need. For example, you can install components to connect between SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and SAP. You can even handle licensing topics over the Landscape Manager. This was a significant improvement, over the years, because it helps us to fully automate even the basic administration, when we are not thinking about interfaces concretely.

We started at a point, 20 years ago, when some of the mechanisms were not there. Now, when you start with SEEBURGER, if you have a clear idea about what you want to do, the initial setup could be done within less than one hour, because of their guided approach. That includes installing the system base with all its components and even deploying a standard solution which provides a lot of integration functionality on more of an abstract level. That way, you do not have to deal with technical details. You just input whatever is required to run your interface, but you do not have to deal with any technical topics.

In general, we have seen ROI, because we have done a lot of consolidation over the last few years and avoided the need for other solutions by using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as our central integration platform. Over the years, we've migrated around 40 to 45 decentralized integration solutions and saved a lot of money and reduced complexity. We have even improved the services we can provide to our partners because they do not necessarily have to deal in a different way in different regions. They always have the choice based on same service offering in each region where OSRAM is active.

They have options for every budget. You can book Cloud Services, starting with a few hundred Euros, depending on what you want, or you can even purchase huge landscapes and operate them on your own or any deployment or operating model in between. The pricing is fair compared to others.

Around one and a half years ago, we evaluated other solutions around the time we introduced the API management within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We recognized that SEEBURGER is the only one which provides such a wide spectrum of functionality, all from one vendor, without adding modules from a third party. All the others we've had an eye on say, "Yeah, we can add this or you can download that plug-in from this company." This is not the case with SEEBURGER. You can have all these components from one vendor, which helps avoid running into trouble because of a vendor saying, "I'm not responsible." That is the biggest strength of SEEBURGER, beside their strong interest in OSRAM. 

They've really spent a lot of time giving us all the answers to all the topics we've been interested in. Once we introduced the API management, even the SEEBURGER CTO spent time aligning with us on what the API management roadmap looks like at SEEBURGER, to ensure that my management could support the decision, together with me, to use SEEBURGER for API management. We introduced it and we are happy with it. We see that what SEEBURGER promised us is now available in the current versions.

Ask SEEBURGER to provide you with information, especially around your demand or requirement concepts, and then follow up with SEEBURGER on a proof of concept. SEEBURGER is quite open to doing proofs of concept with customers, so that the customer knows, 100 percent, that this is the solution that can fulfill their needs. There are multiple options to see what they are doing, but mainly start with a request for information or with a workshop or a proof of concept and find out if SEEBURGER is the right software. In my opinion it is a Yes. Then you can align with them on the next steps. For example, you can decide if the right deployment model for you is in the cloud or if it is on-premises or something in between. SEEBURGER Cloud Services are using exactly the same software you would use to operate your system on-premises. There is no difference and that's a strength, because as more people are using the same software and participate in improving it, the better the quality will be.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself is just transporting data. It is not a data warehouse or business system. But it is heavily supporting real-time traffic. The solution has been supporting API for a few years, and with API you can do real-time calls. It could be that a customer using Salesforce requests the status of an order they have placed with us. They can click in Salesforce and, in real-time, within a few milliseconds, Salesforce is asking SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to extract that information from SAP and to bring it back to the customer within the front end. Within a few milliseconds, the customer can retrieve the latest status. With this up-to-date information, the customer can plan, update and trigger follow-up processes that move his business forward.

Another example is that we have a product catalog which provides data to one of our services where a customer can check for his type of car and the age of his car, and can find a recommendation for the right light bulb. This is done with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) API management, which is embedded in their Business Integration Suite. Within milliseconds, we provide the information about which light bulbs are the right ones for that specific car, send it back to the internet page, and serve the user with that information. Customers can make the right purchase decision in the shortest possible time. Synchronous, asynchronous, near-time and real-time - everything is possible with the same platform. It's like a toolbox.

I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10. Whenever I've had any concerns or was not happy with something, SEEBURGER improved things immediately. There's nothing to complain about.

My organization is on the retail side, so it has been more beneficial on the insurance side of the business because it has allowed them the freedom to do a few more things. It helped them connect to private eyewear doctors so they could upload their insurance forms. Previously, we had to babysit our old software at the end of the month to make sure that files wouldn't get blown up because of their size. Whereas, SEEBURGER BIS doesn't seem to have an issue with this, which saves us time.

The solution helps us automate processes, more on the insurance side. Where they used to have to babysit monthly files, because of size, they don't have to do that with SEEBURGER BIS. They just run the monthly process. Files get collected, translated, and sent to the proper systems, so the babysitting is gone.

It helps keep us up-to-date on regulatory requirements.

I like that you can search documents.

This solution is a little more straightforward versus my old mapper, IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. I can point, click, and link one data field to another, then it will map. With my old mapper, I had to save the data, then read all the records of the table or file before processing the conversion. So, I had to read the data pile, score all the data, and then convert. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I can just take the data and map it to a field, which is more straightforward and robust.

Data mapping is faster in SEEBURGER BIS than IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. It is easier to use the tools in SEEBURGER BIS to debug maps than it is in Sterling B2B Integrator, which has its glitches. For example, I have a special character in the data field. Data will fail when mapping this special character with Sterling, then I have to go in and fix it. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I don't have this issue.

I find it simple to do my mapping. Today, I have that it is pretty simple to set up trading partners.

The West Coast was thinking that SEEBURGER BIS would convert my maps, then they would own the process. The problem: There are times that we have to change dates or something in the map to facilitate what the business is looking to do for a partner. So, it turned out after much bellyaching on my part that this couldn't be done. So, I don't know if we can have a cloud solution and still own the maps. I think they are going towards that direction. We are looking to possibly have them host the server, but then the fees will go up.

I have been using it for slightly over a year. I had some informal/formal training on SEEBURGER BIS.

Our team in California has been using it for three to four years. 

I don't think since I have been involved with SEEBURGER BIS that it has been down. We do have a backup. So, if one server goes down, then it kicks over.

On the technical side, there are five or six users.

We have plans to increase usage of SEEBURGER BIS in the future. The retail side of the business is open to utilizing the solution more. Also, as the insurance business grows, they will definitely be using it.

The technical support is excellent. I reach out to the service desk in Germany and normally get a reply within a day. They are able to get to the root cause of an issue and resolve it. 

I have a consultant in Phoenix, Arizona, who is assigned to our account, and it's usually within the day I get an answer from them.

Right now, we use IBM Sterling B2B Integrator as our EDI platform and are converting over to SEEBURGER BIS. The California team has probably done 85 percent of their conversions. So, they are pretty much up and running. At this point, I have converted roughly 95 of my maps over to SEEBURGER BIS, but none are in production. COVID-19 took a big hit on us, which kind of slowed us down.

We were also using Connect Enterprise, which is another IBM product. Connect Enterprise had reached the end of its life and IBM was no longer supporting it. In addition, it seemed like Connect Enterprise didn't have the capability to handle the file sizes that the insurance side of the business was pushing through.

We switched to SEEBURGER BIS because we want an all-in-one solution for multiple products.

The initial setup was straightforward. A person whom I work with, and is not very technical, found the setup complex, as there are a lot of steps. I put down the steps for her, and she was like, "Oh yeah, this is pretty easy". You just got to follow the guidelines.

I have converted 95 maps. I probably have another 100 to 200 more to go. I use the mapping tool every day. 

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.

This is less babysitting. In the amount of downtime, we are probably saving money, which is a big thing.

They need to be more competitively priced. When it comes to training, they need to lower their prices. It shouldn't be so specific. Maybe they should outsource training to another company. From what I can see, their training is pretty expensive, and they don't do anything for free. I don't expect it for free. However, if I have a quick question, and it takes five minutes to answer then don't charge me 30 minutes. Instead, let it go until you have 15 minutes worth of questions from me before you charge me the 30 minutes.

It is a bit expensive. When I was looking at the product 12 years ago, they were talking about $500,000 for the product. 

When they decided not to move forward with anything to replace IBM Connect Enterprise, I looked for solutions that would benefit our eyewear side of the business. We wanted to go with the version of SEEBURGER BIS that runs on SAP PO, but we were overruled. The organization purchased SEEBURGER BIS and wanted us to use that version too.

I have always liked the product. I looked at the SEEBURGER BIS product almost 12 years ago. However, because of the price, it was shot down.

Understand the cost factor. Have someone from SEEBURGER help you, though this will add to your costs. 

It is fairly simple to pick up as you start using it. Definitely have SEEBURGER train you, if you are not already familiar with the product.

The mapping is easy, but it still takes time to learn.

Because of COVID-19 and the impact on the businesses worldwide, some monies from our budget have been cut. However, I think we are looking to go to 6.7 either the first or second quarter of next year. On the insurance side, with 6.7, they can do a few more things a bit easier because of some of the APIs that can be incorporated. I also think that the footprint of the software is smaller. Less storage is less money that we need to spend on storage. We are also looking at the possibility of having the solution stored on a cloud. We haven't gotten that deep into discussions yet.

Sitting around with SEEBURGER at a seminar in December and discussing their project plan for the future, I think this product is the way to go.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I will probably go up further with my rating as I learn more of its capabilities.

We are an automotive parts supplier and we exchange purchase orders, releases, shipment forecasts, as well as ASNs—shipment notifications, one of the most important documents—invoices, and some non-EDI files. We support North America and South America, but we have colleagues in Europe and Asia as well. We are communicating with most of the automotive companies: Ford, Volvo, Magna, Chrysler and we use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for transactions in the automotive field.

We also use the translator, BIC 6 Converter, and most of the protocols for communication: AS2, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, OFTP, FTPS. We also communicate with some banks.

We have been able to automate processes using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). For example, we have a lot of scheduled tasks or jobs that automatically pull information from other FTP servers, according to a schedule. These automatic flows or processes have reduced costs in a lot of environments, for sure. There are fewer people needed for a specific process in the plant. Also, the timing and accuracy of the information have improved which also helps reduce costs.

It has also helped enable digital business processes in our organization. A lot of processes are now in our BIC 6 system, which helps to improve operations in our plants.

In addition, we only have 30 minutes to send ASNs to a partner, and if this is not achieved we can be subject to fees or lose points in programs, which is not good for the plants. We accomplish this with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Similarly, payments and invoices are sent using the BIC 6 application and the time it takes to receive payments has been decreased.

All of its features are needed for our business and the EDI we have with all our partners. Among the most important are the 

• BIC 6 Converter 
• communication protocols, which have the newer security features for certificates and encryption
• communication with SAP, which is our core system 
• SEEBURGER BIC 6 front end.

In addition, the B2B portal is a good improvement, a good solution.

It's really the complete system that is the most valuable for us.

There are a lot of service packs during the year. I know that part is the process for updating features, but sometimes it's difficult to update service packs every month.

In my current company I have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for four years, and I used it in another company for five years.

It's very stable. We have not had too many issues with the stability of the system. During the year there may be one or two out outages, but in the last year we haven't had any big issues.

Our company is always growing, so we will need a more robust system and, eventually, we will have to go to the cloud. We are very close to having to grow our SAP system. SAP will definitely go to the cloud at some point, so we will need to grow our system, hardware, and architecture in our data center, and BIC 6 for sure.

The scalability is good.

The support is good. 

There is an issue in that sometimes I try to send all the information in my first email, such as the logs and system information, but the ticket that results is different, and support asks for information that we already sent in the first email. I don't know what helpdesk or system they use, but that delays support a little bit. Since I am in Mexico, I end up waiting for another seven or 10 hours to get an answer in which they ask me for something that I already sent. It's not a big deal, but it's an opportunity for improvement.

We had an issue with a certificate with one of our trading partners on a Saturday. We called SEEBURGER support. It was a little difficult because they needed to contact a developer who was not available. But the next day the issue was fixed, and we got the support.

Also, because sometimes there is a delay in the number of service packs we have, when support is needed, the answer is always, "You need to update your version of the service pack." So a reduction in the number of service packs during the year would help. I think 6.7 and the cloud have something along these lines, but for customers like us who are on-premise, the service pack upgrades are difficult.

But as a company, they are always in touch with us and trying to give us what we need. That is the most important thing. They want to see what our needs are and what our current situation is.

We did not have a previous EDI solution.

The setup is not complex. Sometimes what can make it complex is the number of flows or the amount of information. But in terms of the application itself, it's not complex.

The solution is deployed very quickly, even in minutes. The complicated part is testing all the flows with the new solution. That part can take months. For the last upgrade, it took about five months because we had to test all scenarios and business cases. When we found issues we had to report them to SEEBURGER. They had to fix them and we had to install the solution and test it again.

For upgrades, here in Mexico, there are two people from our company who are involved. In Europe there are another four or five more. The same teams manage it on a daily basis. We have developers, people on the communication teams, and business analysts using it. Overall, there are about 10 people using it in North America, and in Europe there are another 10.

It provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow. The flexibility there is good.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that integration is always possible. I have learned that there are many ways to integrate and exchange information in a timely and accurate way.

Having accurate information on time is the most important thing for me. That's the way other people can make decisions. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) helps you to do that.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides us with the solutions we need. We will see with version 6.7 if there is something else. I know there are more features in it. But for now, with version 6.5.2, we have all that we need. We want to see if 6.7 will give us other things that we can use.

To be honest, for us, the most compelling reason to upgrade to 6.7 is the end of support for our current version. If we don't upgrade, we won't have the support. But at the same time, the new version should have some improvements that will make things easier in our jobs and daily operations. I have heard that it has many new applications and a new portal. We could survive with the current solution, but there won't be fixes for it any longer. Also, it's good to have a new version with new APIs and new features.

SEEBURGER BIS monitors our system servers, i.e., the internal and external communications. It monitors that everything works fine. When I need to configure new trading partners, they take care of the customer map. They already have an existing catalog of customers, and I work with them to build a process map. On their end, they build the map for the customer using specific coding, then we do the same in SAP. This is what they monitor. 

It is in the cloud, but hosted by SEEBURGER. They maintain the process via Message Tracking and other applications.

We had a problem. One of our biggest customers in North America, Home Depot, was sending us reports of issues with quantities and pricing. These reports were loaded into SAP, but the business people were not looking at them because SAP is cumbersome and complicated. I raised the situation with my contact at SEEBURGER, and we worked on another type of report. We developed a parallel process, which was their idea, and they provided a new report called Jasper. It converts the transaction into a human readable report and is a parallel process. We send these reports via email to the business people, who do pay attention to them now because they can see the information. They can also react much faster to customer requests.

SEEBURGER BIS is excellent for customer mapping.

SEEBURGER BIS helps us automate processes. When something is manual and we have to fix the data, then it is really complicated. However, when it's automated, we trust it and the process in the system, so we don't have to go back and fix it. For example, we had a problem with a partner sending 17 files every week, but a few times a year, they wouldn't send files during a certain window. We would escalate this with them. Then, when they caught up and sent the files again, they weren't authenticated. We had to fix this situation before it became a nightmare because our financials were impacted. Also, it was really messy. So, I worked with SEEBURGER to have something automated to pick up the files within a certain window and validate them as accurate. If the files come outside of this window, then we have to approve the loading of them.

They are audit compliant. They did their own audit and shared it with me, which was useful. If we need a list of users' accesses, then I can make the request of them. I haven't done an audit of SEEBURGER, but when they do provide me their own reports, that is good enough.

On the technical side, their process is excellent. When we set up a transaction with them, they have a customer map, so we know for sure that we won't have problems. Once it's installed in production, we don't have to go back and change it again. I really love that. If we started supporting the system ourselves, I'm not sure that we would have the same quality of work.

SEEBURGER BIS provides us everything in a unified platform without needing third-party solutions. They are very flexible, providing us things like API solutions. The API will change the industry for EDI. Our other departments already use API, but for us working EDI, this is something new and SEEBURGER is pushing us this information.

The integration is not so excellent. While I'm not saying there is a problem, there is no pattern. When we start a new project, we have to work with new people and processes every time. The technical side of their system is very good, but their change process is not repeatable. It needs to be rebuilt each time.

I have been using the solution for eight years, since 2012.

It has been used in my organization for about 12 years.

The stability is perfect. I sleep well.

The scalability is pretty solid.

I plan to keep working with SEEBURGER as long as I can. When we have an integration, they are there to answer questions and work with us. I don't see any problems if we ever need to increase.

There are approximately 15 business users who connect to the SEEBURGER BIS portal to view transactions. 

The few times that I have had a problem with employees, I escalated the situation and we tried to improve it. When it did not work, they changed the person. 

With the expertise that they developed, they can answer our needs and understand when we have a problem. That is why I feel like when I ask a question, if they don't know, then there is always someone who does know. They have very good expertise.

They have been very reactive to my requests. I wish that they were more proactive when answering though. Maybe they have too many customers?

The initial setup is complex, but for good reason. Of course, I would like to have a simplified process and a customer map that really matches my needs as well as follow their central global team. We have to work with them. That leads to delays and we cannot ask for any changes. It is complex and tedious, but I understand that it is for the good. On the flip side, they are very reliable on the technical end because it's complex at the beginning and they can solve most of the issues.

The deployment time depends on the size of the project. For a simple project, it could take a month to deploy.

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.

It saves time by doing things automatically.

I had a problem at one time with their invoicing. I told them, then we worked on the process and improved it. 

They installed the connection between SAP and SEEBURGER BIS in Europe first. This was awhile ago. When I came along, I became involved in the project and started working with them. Every time that I made a request, the work was done well, but I was not receiving my invoices. I knew I had to pay for the work and was trying to find someone to send me the invoices or a report of what was being done. From that end, it was really not working. After a few years, I was complaining and not happy. At the end of the year, they would come with a long list of invoices to pay, which was really bad. So, I asked for a change. We worked on the process, and since five years ago, I have worked with SEEBURGER based in North America. 

Now, when I have a question, I know who to contact. They send me a report with invoices every month. They really reacted to my concern, and we improved the process. Since then, I have had no problem. 

You will sleep well, because it's very reliable. They have good expertise and knowledge for providing solutions. If I need an EDI solution, I recommend going with them. I have mentioned a few issues on invoicing and time to answer back, but these are not such a problem. I'm not going to partner up on a technical solution with someone because they are nice in their emails and fast. I want a good, solid technical solution.

When we have a need, I go to them, and usually they have a solution for us.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We are a third-party logistics company. We work for a lot of people. We've got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) because we needed an SFTP server over 10 years ago. We have a lot of customers at various levels of IT maturity. Originally it all started off with just FTP, but we now use AS2 and SFTP an awful lot, and we're now moving into the API world.

There are some common interfaces here and there but, generally, it's all bespoke to each customer, of which we have about 75 to 80 and that's changing every month. We run in the realm of 800,000 processes a week. There is about a 50-50 split between internal systems talking to it and external customers sending files in.

The solution is on-premise.

We now have everything on a single system, which is nice. We got rid of a lot of the legacy, although we now have a legacy SEEBURGER system.

The solution's capabilities in fulfilling our existing B2B integration requirements are brilliant. Among our multiple customers we connect to SAP systems, JDE, all the various ERPs that you can possibly get, Oracle procurement systems, etc. We haven't come across anything yet — and customers are trying to trip us up — that we can't do.

Using the solution, we've created our own processes such that we have our own building blocks. That has made it a lot quicker to deploy interfaces. I would estimate our efficiency has increased by 50 percent as a result.

I don't know if the solution has saved us money, but it has given greater capabilities and therefore we can make more money because we are able to connect to different customers' systems.

Its flexibility is the most valuable feature. We can hook up using any protocol that's out there, to anybody. We've got a good in-house team that can work out with all the parts of it, including transformations for the bespoke processes that we sometimes need.

We're not using half of its capabilities at the moment so haven't hit the edges of it yet. We're not particularly leading edge, nor are most of our customers.

There are some aspects of the front-end GUI, the actual queries that you use, that could be improved. They're all very minor to be honest. It's quite a nice modular system. It fits together quite well. The changes would be to the usability of the system at the front-end. It's not the underlying processing function of the system. It's how we maintain things and being able to see what's going on.

We've been using the solution for about ten years.

The stability is generally pretty good. We used the first version we installed and we just left it, which is where this aspect of then not doing reviews of the current technical solution came in and tripped us up a couple of times.

The new version is very stable. We haven't had any issues at all. At one point our database disappeared for ten minutes and it didn't notice. The system stayed up, which was rather nice. It didn't cause any major outage, which it should have done. It's a well-thought-out and implemented system, from what we can see.

We have no issues with scalability at the moment. The old version was really creaking at the seams when we eventually migrated everything, or most things, off it of it. That was a bit touch and go for a couple of months. The new one has not got any issues at all.

The usage is increasing all the time. It is the integration tool within this company. It's a central part of all the internal processes that we have. It's the glue that holds the company together as such, in a lot of cases. It is being invested in quite heavily.

Their technical support is okay. It doesn't blow you away. They will come back with an answer. It won't be the answer you would like, generally. For the first seven years, and since we got 6.3.2 in, the answer was always, "You need to upgrade." That was kind of annoying, but to be expected I suppose.

We've been landed with a consultant from SEEBURGER who doesn't know the system inside and out, which is a little bit frustrating sometimes. Other than that, they generally come back with answers to queries reasonably quickly and accurately.

We were previously using Mercator as the transformation tool, but it was very old at the time and needed replacing as it was unable to provide SFTP.

The setup is getting a lot smoother. It's reasonably easy in the latest versions. Our previous system was generally Unix. We're now on to virtually a wholly Windows setup, which brings different sorts of problems. I'm actually quite impressed with the way that the SEEBURGER team is able to put out patches. It's very smooth, which is quite refreshing.

It took about four or five months from starting the build to actually getting off of customer migration.

We are currently migrating from 6.32 to 6.52. The initial migration was reasonably good, but we have an awful lot of customers — individual companies that we connect to — and some of them are pretty difficult to get off the old system. We're getting close to the end. There are some IT departments among our customers where they will put the initial product in for connecting to us and then everybody leaves and there will promptly be a problem. But we'll get there. We do have a plan to move to 6.7 fairly soon but we need to get rid of the old one first.

We haven't found that many differences between 6.32 and 6.52 — the two versions that we use. We have had to change some of the transformation codes to fit in.

For our migration, the strategy was basically to build a brand-new system, which is what we had to do anyway. There was no getting away from that. With our current system, we may well do an in-place upgrade from 6.52 to 6.7. We just have to add a few servers and then we're good to go.

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.

On an annual basis, our support costs, which are based on the licensing, are about £120,000.

As you increase the size of your system, the per-CPU usage goes up. You're licensed for CPU and any modules that you may require, such as API management. The maintenance cost, going forward, is 20 percent.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees, other than consultancy, which is usually required to install a new aspect of the system.

The fact is that we use it for everything. It's pretty good really.

My advice would be: Don't hand the initial development over to SEEBURGER itself. When we first put the product in, the SEEBURGER consultants that came along wrote very complex interfaces for things that didn't really need to be that complex. We're only just removing some of those complexities, because it's not really very supportable. The best thing would be, if you're doing it the way we do it, to either hand it all over to SEEBURGER and let them look after it, or if you're keeping it in-house, get your people trained to the eyeballs so that they can do the initial system setup themselves.

In our environment, there aren't really users, per se. We allow some users within IT to view the front-end, but that's ten people at any one time. However, as I say, the number of processes that run through it in files, that's what we consider to be our user base, and it's in the vicinity of 300,000 per week. We have a team of four to deploy and maintain the solution. We call them the integration specialists or EDI specialists.

The fact that SEEBURGER invests a high portion of revenue into R&D, rather than promoting brand awareness, is good for us. Some local companies use SEEBURGER & they usually take it on because they need some aspect of the system that isn't provided for by any other systems.

We have plans to use one of the solution's additional services, the API management. We use our own, in-house MFT, which we don't require to become cleverer than it currently is. It's a very simple sort of system. But the API, that's the new kid on the block, which we will start working on. We're starting on that path. That will be work that happens this year, probably when we migrate to 6.7. That's when the API management will come in, in a major way. It's not so much our customers who are driving that, it's more suppliers.

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.