New Report Data Supports Need for SAP Information Interchange

According to a recently published Forrester study, as little as 19 percent of enterprises (with more than $1 billion per year in revenue) conduct EDI or other B2B e-commerce with more than 80 percent of their communities. My apologies in advance for being mathematically challenged, but I think these numbers mean the following:

• 81 percent of companies with $1 billion and more in revenue do not use EDI or B2B e-commerce with 20 percent or more of their trading partners...is that right? Or another way of saying it - less than 20% of large companies can implement EDI/B2B with 80% or more of their trading partners. My guess is that companies with less than $1 billion have an even smaller percentage of trading partners exchanging data via EDI.

Forrester also reports that nearly 85 percent of respondents (300 companies) currently use some form of B2B e-commerce services, versus software, in their B2B environments. That is an interesting number to me. I thought there would be more of a battle between the internal EDI department and outsourced EDI managed services - it appears companies are widely accepting outsourced EDI managed services.

Forty-six percent of respondents, according to Forrester, plan on putting more focus on services-based transport for B2B in the next three years. This number bodes well for solutions like the SAP Information Interchange that offers EDI as a managed service to the SAP community.

Why are companies moving toward EDI and B2B managed services? Forrester says companies are looking to reduce costs, convert more paper to electronic document exchanges and improve visibility into the business.

In summary, large amounts of expensive paper documents continue to be mailed and manually processed even within large enterprises with legacy EDI systems and infrastructures. There is a huge need for more EDI and B2B implementations and companies are increasingly turning to EDI/B2B managed services to solve this problem.

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Author: Kevin Benedict
Principal Consultant/Founder
SAP EDI, Mobile Enterprise Computing and Web 2.0 Marketing Consultant
Netcentric Strategies LLC
www.netcentric-strategies.com
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://b2b-bpo.blogspot.com
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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