TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is Electronic Business?

What is B2B Processing?

How does B2B work?

How do companies use B2B?

What are B2B Standards?

Why are B2B Standards important?

Who defines B2B Standards?

Who should be involved in B2B Processing?

What is a B2B Processing Network?

B2B Primer

How does B2B work?

B2B processing starts with understanding the business process workflow and how the process quality is managed.  Information technologies and B2B standards are used to automate and implement each B2B process.

Process Integration

B2B uses standards-based business documents to support each step of a process workflow.

The business documents are created by the company’s business applications and are sent to business partners.

Some processes require the partner to send back a related business document to integrate the process workflow, such as Purchase Order Request and Purchase Order Response.

B2B Information Exchange refers to sending and receiving business documents between partners by using system-to-system integration to automate the workflow.

There are two general ways companies implement B2B solutions.

1. Direct Connection with the computers and business applications at one company communicating directly with a business partner’s computers to ?send and receive information.

   This is also called “peer-to-peer” communication sending data directly between companies.

2. Processing Service with the computers and business applications at both companies communicating with a separate company/computer that provides B2B-processing capabilities.  The processing service handles the information exchange between the two partners.

   This is also called “hub-and-spokes” communications where each company is a “spoke” and all communications go through the “hub”.