A key issue for Organizations has always been to support low cost, direct involvement of partners, such as sales, vendors etc.
However approaches for partner integration have traditionally supported EDI kind of approaches where partner is expected to possess certain level of technical sophistication. These approaches involve significant capital cost and effort to get partners on board.
By Partner Collaboration here, we refer to context where partners can participate with limited rights in organization functions, such as data reporting, perform functions with limited but sufficient rights.
Key issues with Partner Collaboration include the following:
- Recognizing external users: The system must expose capabilities in a secure but limited manner by recognizing external user.
- Low cost: The system must provide for low cost, quick but standardized mechanisms for involving partners in company functions.
- Audit history, security: Audit history of information exchanged with partners is a crucial element via transaction history.
- Security: Often transaction history must be secured to present non repudiable transaction history.
- Accessibility of Audit history: With many external partners involved, it is often crucial to ensure strong segregation of data and ensuring transaction history for viewing is segregated.
- Rule based processing: Transaction processing must pass through several checks before it is accepted for processing, hence rule based processing is often crucial.
- Alerting on anomalies: System must automatically recognize issues with data reported and take alerting actions for timely intervention.
Our Approach to build strong partner collaboration in applications is based on our platform EMF- Event Management Framework.
- The focus of EMF to provide mobility, accessibility to a wide field force with strong pre-built data filtering, reporting and alerting functions delivers power to you by serving as eyes and ears via your field force that you always desired and deserved. The field workforce may include your external partners, making them active participants in your business.
- EMF comes packaged with external partner delivery streams, thus enabling B2B integration bridges for delivery and acceptance of data from partners.
- External partners can be made to participate in the system with pre-defined 'external user' roles and limited functions may be exposed on choice to external users.