We’ve all experienced the trauma and frustration of a lost letter or parcel from a house move, an address change, or even postage not paid. It’s an often long and painful process of retrieval and this feels yet more stressful if your missing post is an invoice, a payment, or a worse still, a tax demand.

There are even instances of lost mail relating to fixed penalty notices, court appearances and final demands from bailiffs that can have catastrophic consequences. Just think about that for a second or two… an unforeseen error that causes so much pain.

This gives a perspective on the business-critical world that is B2B data integration where ‘unforeseen errors’ can cost £millions. In an ideal world, businesses co-ordinate their data strategies in a timely, secure and efficient manner, after all this is what enables our business economies to run efficiently and at high speed. But pandemics, price increases and even pending war has forced businesses to expect unprecedented disruption to supply chains, operations and of course their own workforce that many of us rely on.

As a result, these instances of trauma and frustration are no longer short-term blips or one-off occurrences, and the case for businesses to automate and secure B2B data sharing has never been stronger.

B2B data integration touches all industries in different ways, but if and when data is lost, the pain is universal. This is true whether the data loss is incomplete bank reconciliations, delays in hospital records sharing, gaps in the goods-in/goods-out/stock ledgers for distribution businesses, or even customers private data escaping to the dark web.

The fact is that as enterprises grow, so does the complexity of keeping data safe and secure especially during file transfers with vendors, partners and third parties. The challenge that businesses now face is that in IT procurement, licensing and maintenance, B2B rarely gets the attention it deserves. All too often it is overlooked until of course, there’s a breach of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or significant data loss that incurs penalty or regulator fine, and that’s when it can get very expensive.  

As enterprises grow, so does the complexity of keeping data safe and secure especially during file transfers with vendors, partners and third parties.

So what can you do about this before this happens? What is the best practice for business owners and their respective heads of information and technology? Here are the 3 key steps for true data safety for 2022:

1. Plan Ahead: Don’t just think about your data needs for today’s business, consider the needs for at least two years’ time. Any solution you look at should be resilient and easily scaled to meet future data demands; if not, it’s a waste of your budget.

2. Partner Fit: Seek approval and buy-in for your solution not just with your in-house team, but also amongst your existing partners and where possible, your future partners. By ensuring they can easily adopt your solution means that it can be integrated, maintained and upgraded without disruption or additional costs.

3. Mass Connectivity: Pick a solution that supports flexible connectivity and compatibility with most, if not all, of the different software systems of your enterprise. By adopting the necessary communication standards from Application Programming Interfaces to cloud integration and Managed File transfers, enables you to cover all eventualities.

As a long term IBM partner, Bluebird are fortunate to utilise industry leading software that embraces these 3 steps. Thanks to our IBM Sterling portfolio, cutting edge B2B and MFT Managed File Transfer solutions can be tailored to each client relationships to create optimal performance and security. Bluebird are proud to have deployed IBM B2B Integrator, Sterling File Gateway and Connect:Direct solutions for countless clients in financial services, distribution and wider industries.

To find out more about how best to gather, process or exchange data securely, on-time and in-full with your partners, get in touch with one of our Sterling experts or request a Free Discovery Workshop via the link below.

Neil Jenkinson, Bluebird Marketing Director