Transform your EDI Processes with B2B Integration in the Cloud

The benefits to businesses of B2B Integration in general and e-invoicing in particular have been widely documented in multiple reports. An EC report quotes 238 billion Euros, 400,000 tons of paper, 2,700 tons of ink, 160 million litres of petrol as an estimate of what European businesses would save by adopting e-invoice. The benefits are much larger if one includes other traditional B2B document flows such as purchase orders and dispatch notes.

The two traditional methods of automating data exchanges between business partners (B2B Integration), are either (1) to acquire B2B translation software, or (2) to join a B2B integration environment. The first method is also the most historically common method.

Companies buy (or custom build) and install a B2B communication system within a company’s internal IT environment and organize point-to-point communication with other companies via private networks (X400 network or, so-called value-added networks).

This way of doing B2B integration enables a great deal of flexibility. Participants control the individual B2B relationships and their technical components. However, this method requires a significant investment in money, time and skills. Larger companies have traditionally opted for this method.

Together with the Internet, a second method of carrying out B2B Integration emerged: the B2B integration environment. Point-to-point communication is replaced by a central environment or “platform” which means that one communication to the central environment is sufficient to reach all other partners.

The B2B integration environment enables one to communicate rapidly with a community of trading partners. The value proposition of the B2B integration environment is to create a single technical link between an individual company and the environment. B2B data flows will then be technically organized by the environment. This method corresponds to outsourcing to a third party. It leads to a loss of control and sometimes a loss of speed when the time comes to connect to a new business partner. Medium-sized companies have usually chosen this method.

Babelway B2B integration Software-as-a-Service has bridged the 2 traditional methods. Babelway enables customers to connect directly to their partners, avoiding the need for B2B intermediaries. Customers therefore have complete control over their data flows. In addition, Babelway does not require the acquisition of in-house software and infrastructure. Customers can avoid the investment and the operational costs of running a B2B infrastructure and benefit from automated data exchange at much lower costs. The community of Babelway users can share common components of data flows (e.g. the invoice format of Carrefour Belgium) through a catalogue of components which leads to a decrease in the time it takes to build new channel as the community increases.

Babelway offers absolute flexibility to companies of all sizes and at any level of data exchange volumes. They can decide to control data flows or outsource some of it to external IT partners. They can quickly deploy to business partners or stage an on-boarding project based on general business priorities.

This document describes the innovative EDI and e-invoice Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) developed by Tradeshift Belgium. It is addressed to those carrying out an in-depth evaluation of a B2B Integration solution. We also advise these people to register online now to freely discover for themselves what Babelway can do and how it works.

Babelway B2B Integration Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) allows organizations to automate cross-company processes and enables the secure exchange of structured and recurrent documents such as orders, invoices, pay slips, reports, payment advice, etc.

Tradeshift Belgium has developed Babelway into a widely renowned and respected product in its core field of B2B integration. Babelway processes tens of million documents a year for several hundreds of customers worldwide from very diverse industries like retail, automotive, logistics or fintech.

All it takes to be ready to automate data exchange with ANY business partner or computer application is to register online at www.babelway.net. Babelway guarantees foolproof security, unlimited scalability and first-class performance. Babelway is the solution for rapidly connecting to a trading community while still retaining full control over data flows.

Babelway offers a wide range of functionality to build and administer channels between 2 systems. Babelway supports many communications protocols including Rest API’s, AS2 and AS4, FTP(s), sFTP, email, SOAP, PEPPOL, RosettaNet. Babelway supports many formats, XML, UBL, Excel, Edifact, X12, VDA, CSV and any custom flat-file formats and more.

Babelway is equipped with multiple functionalities such as drag&drop mapping interfaces, message validation, electronic signature, look-up tables, test environment, routing, email notifications, catalogue of ready-to-use components, message tracking, issue management, access and privilege management, capacity and performance management and storage and archiving management.

Babelway software and infrastructure is managed using the strictest quality and security management processes. Babelway information security management system (ISMS) is built according to ISO27001 standard to ensure total security in highly technical environments. Babelway hosting is based on a multi-location strategy with at least 2 redundant data centers for each component of the infrastructure. All systems are permanently monitored by internal and external systems. Storage is encrypted to guarantee confidentiality. Babelway conforms to legal requirements in e-invoicing. Since 2013 Deloitte, KrikPatrickPrice and now KPMG provide ISO27001 certification, SOC1 and SOC 2 reports on the system controls intended to meet the criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy.

Babelway offers helpdesk support. Customers can call upon Babelway professional services to support them with on-boarding partners, designing new channels, developing internal or external communication plans and generally execute projects in relation to the exploitation of the Babelway platform. Babelway also develops partnerships with software vendors and IT integrators to enable customers to find help from the most effective source whenever required.

Babelway regularly organises training sessions and plans to develop a certification program for qualified individuals.

Chapter 1: Functionalities overview Babelway Platform is a multi-tenant integration software as-a-service (SaaS). It enables to quickly and cost-effectively automate B2B flows such as EDI messages and electronic invoices across all customers, suppliers, and partners. Leveraging the SaaS model, Babelway helps to streamline the deployment, maintenance, and monitoring of B2B exchanges giving greater confidence and control over business processes. Because Babelway is a cloud-powered integration platform, it offers quick and cost-effective integration to SaaS and on-premise applications. This means that clients can achieve significantly improved data management, more efficient processes, lower enterprise costs, and better resource allocation.

Babelway services are fully available on-demand via a web-browser. There is no software or hardware to buy and maintain in-house, but yet Babelway is still under the full control of its users.

This chapter briefly describes the main functionalities of the software.

A channel is the collection of components that must be assembled within Babelway in order to organize an automatic data flow from an external system A to another external system B. The key components are:

1. The way in which Babelway is interfaced with system A, called the “gateway IN”,
2. The way in which system A formats data, called the “message IN”
3. The format in which system B wants to receive data, called the “message OUT”
4. The way in which Babelway is interfaced with system B, called the “gateway OUT”
5. In between the message in, and message out, we provide an innovative drag and drop transformation step to map from one format to another.

In building channels, Babelway contains the following functionalities:

Creating transformation rules between the message IN and the message OUT.

Users can create the transformation rules using the drag & drop interface tool. Users can create correspondences between the message IN and the message OUT by dragging and dropping message fields from left to right.

For more complex transformation operations, users have a portfolio of standard operations they can call upon (concatenation, date formatting, etc.). More advanced users can also define new standard operations using the xpath syntax or xslt functions.

Babelway offers a unique advanced capability to extract information from machine generated PDF documents. This feature prevents costly manual processing by enabling EDI-like processing of semi-structured data.

Users can define validation rules to be applied on incoming and/or outgoing messages. For example, validation can make the presence of values in some fields mandatory or make them correspond to a pre-set of values. Validation is particularly useful to prevent that an external system received messages that it cannot process automatically.

Users can configure channels such that outgoing messages are signed using a dedicated advanced certificate and if the outgoing format enables such signature (must be PDF or ZIP format). (See the relevant chapter for details of security and certificate management).

Users can define and load tables of values, called look-up tables, which are used during the transformation process to change an incoming value into a corresponding outgoing value. An illustrative application of look-up tables is to enable a buyer and a supplier to use different product codes to identify similar products (e.g. GTIN codes versus internal codification).

Users can build test cases of their channels. The test cases enable users to check the result of their work on message formats and transformation prior to deploying a channel into the production environment.

Messages originating from a common source but going to various external systems must be routed. Users can define routing rules based on message content items or on message context.

An visualization tools allows to view the overall interactions between channels:

For each individual channel, users can build automatic notifications that will send an email to a specified address upon the arrival of a new message. Notified users can be different if the message is successfully processed or an error is generated. Notification can also be sent to another channel for further processing.

Gateway parameters, message formats, transformation and validation rules are created during the channel building process. Each of these items can be re-used in the building of a subsequent channel. This is organized via what we call the catalogue, the place where all new items are listed.

Users populate a new channel from the items available in their catalogue. This catalogue enriches itself progressively each time new channels are built. When users decide to source an item from the catalogue, they make a choice to use the same instance or to duplicate it. This choice is important when making changes to channels. If channels share the same instance of an item, a change in one channel will impact all other channels using the same item.

Users decide which channels and/or components are under construction and which must be activated upon deployment in the production environment of Babelway.

Note: Babelway will soon enable users to open up their catalogue to other selected Babelway users, so that channel items created by one user can be re-used by another user. Functionalities will include the secure management of access rights, the possibility of charging for the use of catalogue items and the possibility of tracking and measuring the usage of catalogue items.

Messages that flow through the user environment can be tracked and traced. Users have access to any message stored, in all its forms (before, during and after transformation) together with contextual information such as time of entry, time of exist, status, as well as relevant security-related information such as certificates and signatures.

Messages that are in error can be accessed directly for manual correction and resubmitted in a channel. In this case, a new message is created and the message status of the original message is changed to ‘Error Closed’.

A function to massively resubmit messages is also available to the user.

The messages stays accessible online to user during the whole retention period, as configured in the environment settings or overwritten in the channel configuration.

During this period, the entire information about the message are kept, including the inbound and outbound messages, all intermediate formats as well as the metadata and processing traces.

Multiple events generate alerts. For example, an alert is created when a FTP polling to a remote server cannot be completed due to a connection timeout. Alerts provide detailed information to users, as well as tools for resolution management.

The account management function includes the following services:

From very small numbers to 50 millions of messages per month, Babelway is ensuring the timely processing capacity, without being dependent on the general consumption of capacity in other Babelway environments.

As a default option, Babelway stores messages for a period of 3 months. Users can select the ‘long-term archiving’ option which provides storage for any period of time up to 12 years.

Other terms of storage (shorter or longer) may be accommodated individually.

The system, based on service-oriented architecture, enables horizontal scalability and data segregation. The system is mainly divided into 2 parts:

1. The SelfService application, a single instance,
2. The messaging engine components, multiple instances to support geography and privacy.