webMethods Trading Networks

Eliminate the extra hardware and software licenses and maintenance fees that come with maintaining multiple B2B systems. Now you can have a single point of entry into your enterprise for all of your B2B transactions.

webMethods Trading Networks is your scalable, easy-to-manage gateway for doing business electronically with customers, distributors and trading partners worldwide. This enterprise-class B2B gateway is built on webMethods Integration Server to automate your B2B transactions, such as purchase requisitions, orders and invoices. Traditional ways of interacting with suppliers can be expensive, slow and error-prone. Trading Networks, instead, enables real-time, accurate information exchange—and helps you avoid expensive VAN usage fees.Plus, you can add on suppliers quickly and easily, thanks to extensive support for industry standards and data formats, such as XML, EDI and flat-file documents.

• Seamlessly grow trading communities by automating support for on-ramping of new trading partners and easily managing growing communities of trading partners
• Achieve real-time B2B integration through comprehensive and robust standards, enabling real-time information exchange with businesses of any size and technical capability
• Consolidate deployments through a centralized B2B gateway for all trading partners reducing infrastructure, people, training and operational costs
• Streamline trading partner management through webMethods Trading Networks, providing seamless real-time integration with external business partners
• Ensure reliable document transfer through secure EDI over the internet using SSL, enabling complete migration of existing EDI VAN infrastructure to webMethods Trading Networks
• Use a single API gateway to control firewall security, selectively expose APIs, manage partner access and deploy all your B2B capabilities, including EDI and managed file transfers

Partner profile management

Onboard partners faster and improve how you manage them by using a shared administrative infrastructure. For each partner, you can define:

• All supported messaging transports
• Document routing information
• Processing information
• Security certificates
• Contact details

Define and store whatever profile data you need to automate and manage your partnerships and ensure the documents are sent and received securely.

Partner self-service

Managing a large number of trading partners can take time. webMethods Trading Networks offers self-service capabilities to streamline this process as well as empower your partners to track and manage their own transactions. Partners can easily manage their own profiles and track their own B2B activity, reducing your administrative costs and enhancing your partner relationships.

Role-based access

Meet compliance requirements and assure top security with stringent role-based access. With webMethods Trading Networks, you can tightly control who sees trading partner profiles and the associated transaction data. You control exactly what information people can see as well as the actions they can take based on their roles. You can set role-based access for both people inside your organization and at your trading partners.

Why manage many different B2B platforms when a single, unified gateway is all you need? webMethods Trading Networks supports any document format and any messaging transport protocol so you can automate multi-business processes with any trading partner.

Document creation & parsing

Create and process all types of document formats—from traditional EDI documents using X12 or UN/EDIFACT to those in an industry-specific XML format, to flat-file documents, such as spreadsheets. Support a wide range of document formats rapidly using webMethods eStandards modules. As a unified B2B gateway, webMethods Trading Networks works with all document formats equally— for the documents you send to trading partners, when parsing and processing messages sent to you and when seamlessly integrating B2B message data with your internal application data.

Document validation for every format

Assure data accuracy and high quality. That’s critical to maintaining good trading partnerships. With webMethods Trading Networks, you can ensure the data you send and receive is correct

and reliable. webMethods Trading Networks enables you to validate every document to see that it meets its specifications—no matter if the format is EDI, XML or a flat file.

Versatile messaging transport support

Whatever your business, you need flexibility in how you communicate with your partners so you can integrate with new partners fast. That means your B2B integration solutions must “speak” the same message transports. That’s no problem with webMethods Trading Networks.

You can work with any messaging transport protocol, including:

• Industry messaging transports, such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP and EDIINT
• Specialized standards, such as RNIF, ebXML, AS4 and SOAP

Trading Networks also makes it easy to define messaging transport options at the partner level.

Secure message delivery

Ensure your documents are delivered and received securely with your trading partners. webMethods Trading Networks supports industry-standard security and encryption standards and protocols, such as HTTPS, so your data is only read by the people who are supposed to read it.

Processing rules help simplify your B2B integrations. You can define and execute B2B processes based on criteria, such as document type and message payload, to maximize standardization, efficiently re-use assets and reduce the headaches of point-to-point integrations.

Re-usable rules

Reduce errors and inefficiencies by implementing consistent and re-usable document processing rules. Processing rules provide flexibility in your partner communications and ensure consistent and reliable data. Your application developers can define rules for document processing based on document and/ or partner criteria to ensure the correct processing of data.

Flexible processing logic options include:

• Service invocation
• Polling
• Scheduling
• Mapping and translation

Built on webMethods Integration Server, webMethods Trading Networks provides graphical mapping, orchestration and testing tools, as well as a library of pre-built transformation services.

Using these tools, you can:

• Quickly map and transform business data to and from any B2B document format
• Simplify and streamline integration with any application or service within your enterprise
• Integrate seamlessly with other products in the webMethods suite

Back-end integration

Quickly tie your B2B processes to your back-end systems and orchestrate your B2B processes via webMethods Integration Server. Because Trading Networks is built directly on top of webMethods Integration Server, you can easily integrate existing services, applications and other data sources using web services or the suite of webMethods Adapters.

Real-time & batch modes

You’ve got all kinds of different partnerships with customers, suppliers, distributors and other trading partners. So you need flexibility in how and when you exchange and process documents. That’s exactly what webMethods Trading Networks provides. You can work in real time, eliminating costly delays, as well as in batch mode as required.

You want to know about problems—before they make an impact—whether you are managing your supply chain, payments, or product and catalog information. Learn how to headoff problems and respond quickly using webMethods Trading Networks. With complete transaction visibility, you can effectively manage your community of trading partners and resolve issues—faster. Software AG also offers webMethods Optimize for B2B—advanced monitoring and analysis capabilities that give you better insight into the health of your trading network and enable you to provide real-time data to your business.

Operational visibility

Track and manage every B2B transaction. You’ll gain complete visibility into B2B transactions across your entire trading network. Use powerful search capabilities based on virtually any criteria. Instantly see the status of your transactions. You also can quickly understand and assess the condition of your trading network using reports produced by webMethods Trading Networks.

Message repair & resubmit

When a problem occurs in a transaction, you want to fix it—fast. You can do that with webMethods Trading Networks. Locate the problem’s source by drilling down into transaction data, including message header and routing information as well as the message payload itself. Then, take corrective or preventive action as needed. You can easily update fields within a message and resubmit it. This saves you from having to wait on your partners to fix an issue on their side and then resend the message.

Auditing & logging

Whether it is for the daily management of your business or to support security or compliance initiatives, you need a record of the information that flows through your B2B gateway. webMethods Trading Networks provides the ability to capture all of your message transaction data in a centralized audit log. You can access the log easily anytime, whether the data is new or has been archived last month or last year