In our previous blogs How to Modernize Your B2B/EDI Management Platform with Boomi and Jumpstart Your B2B/EDI Management Platform with Perficient, we discussed the benefits of a modern B2B/EDI platform and Perficient’s offerings to help your organization effectively integrate with vendors, suppliers, distributors, partners, and marketplaces, respectively. In today’s blog, we will share how we helped a global skincare brand modernize its ecommerce platform during a global shift to online retail.

Applying the Foundation for Effortless Ecommerce

Our client is a global skincare brand that formulates makeup and a variety of skincare products. To meet the needs and demands of a growing customer base, our client decided to expand online ordering to international customers. However, they were not equipped to handle the increase in order volume, and order processing could take multiple days. Compounded by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to online retail, our client needed a solution that would integrate its ecommerce platform with back-end operations and automatically trigger order processing.

The company chose to upgrade its ecommerce platform to Shopify, a subscription-based software service that offers a shopping cart solution to sell, ship, and manage products. They also replaced their legacy integration platform with Boomi and integrated Boomi with Shopify for a low-maintenance solution that provides enterprise integration capabilities.

First, we integrated Boomi’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) with Shopify. This created end-to-end automation that syncs our client’s online orders with back-end operations. Next, we used Boomi pre-built connectors to ensure that the latest SAP product catalog information appears in Shopify.

Shopify’s automated workflows can be easily customized or modified to support any business need. Future integrations between cloud applications and on-premises systems can be accomplished seamlessly for enterprise scalability and elasticity.

Taking Order Fulfillment From Days to Minutes

Boomi’s cloud-native platform eliminates the need to install or maintain software. Updates are automatically installed and pricing is based on usage, which will save our client time and money.

Boomi’s multi-tenant architecture offers elasticity, is easy to use, and brings an accelerated time to value in addressing application integrations.

Our solution reduced order processing time from several days to just five minutes. Shopify and back-end systems are synced to avoid stockouts and back orders, and product availability and pricing is current, which ensures transparent shopping experiences for customers.

Why Perficient

Perficient is a Boomi Select Partner with deep expertise in key technologies that support IT modernization. Our expertise, coupled with Boomi’s innovative, cloud-native platform, delivers increased value, low cost of ownership, and drives better, faster outcomes for our clients.

Contact us today to explore options for elevating your business.

In our previous blog How to Modernize Your B2B/EDI Platform with Boomi, we discussed the benefits of a modern B2B/EDI platform, Boomi’s platform capabilities, and seven tips to help get you started. In today’s blog, we will explore Perficient’s offerings to help your organization effectively integrate with vendors, suppliers, distributors, partners, and marketplaces.

Perficient is a Boomi Select Partner with deep expertise in key technologies that support IT modernization. Our training and consulting services can help you leverage Boomi B2B/EDI Management for your organization.

Boomi EDI Developer Training

Our Boomi Developer Training is focused on giving developers the tools to build, deploy, and manage Boomi integrations. For our Boomi EDI Developer training, specifically, developers will be trained in B2B/EDI foundations and how to create an EDI profile, including how to configure EDI Data Elements and EDI options. We will also introduce developers to EDI mapping, EDI envelopes, creating trading partners, and EDI document tracking and handling.

Throughout the training, we will provide guidance on designing processes that fit the needs of your organization’s specific use cases.

Design & Architecture Training

Through our Design and Architecture Training, we will instruct you on how to configure Boomi iPaas to support real-time integration and scales to meet the high-volume demands of EDI environments and best practices to ensure significant ROI. We will cover Boomi technical architecture, Boomi runtime architecture, and EDI architecture and communication methods.

We will factor in your organization’s specific needs to help architect an effective solution design and approach. We will also cover Boomi Flow, a cloud-native service for building and automating workflows to provide business value in record time, architecture and use cases.

Consulting

Our Consulting services will help you define an integration and/or cloud strategy and work with your teams to design, develop, test, and deploy integrations according to best practices.

Why Perficient

Our expertise, coupled with Boomi’s innovative, cloud-native platform, delivers increased value, low cost of ownership, and drives better, faster outcomes for our clients.

To learn more about or services or to get started today contact us here.

For more on our Boomi partnership, click here.

EDI remains an indispensable technology that has evolved gradually over the last 50 years, but many EDI products are showing their age. EDI is at the heart of business transactions between corporations and their business partners, however, businesses have changed drastically since the EDI standard got its start in the military in the late 1940s.

Over the past several decades, the digital economy has become the economy and supply chains are global. Now is the time for businesses to keep pace with these changes, but to do so, it is essential to understand B2B processes and technologies and how to optimize them. In this blog, we will explore Boomi’s EDI Management Platform and how you can get started with modernizing your EDI network.

Boomi’s B2B/EDI Management Platform Capabilities

Boomi’s low-code development platform allows companies to easily set up and manage B2B integrations, onboard partners, and integrate EDI with their existing processes and legacy applications. By breaking down traditional EDI silos and centralizing application-to-application, B2B, and API management, Boomi allows customers to maximize the return on their EDI investments. Increased transparency into EDI transactions allows for quick responses and improves interactions with partners.

Building on the success of its existing platform, Boomi has extended its set of EDI management features to further simplify and speed up how companies build and manage their trading partner networks. The enhancements include:

• Empowering Business Users for Operational Agility: Boomi enables business users to add, remove, or change specific parts of an EDI configuration to respond to business requirements, thus increasing business agility and responsiveness.
• More Reusable Components: Reusing common EDI components increases flexibility, reduces duplication, and simplifies updates. This is particularly valuable for companies with varied lines of businesses, semi-autonomous business units, or units acquired through mergers and acquisitions.
• Programmatic Onboarding for Trading Partners via Boomi APIs: Boomi EDI simplifies and speeds up onboarding, reducing the time required from weeks to hours.
• Trading Partner Reporting Portal: The new Boomi portal provides authorized users essential EDI documentation. Users can easily add filters to track documents or discover materials associated with a document’s lifecycle. Users can track documents by key number, PO number, customer number, or other document attributes.
• Trading Partner Management UI: The Boomi Trading Partner Management user interface provides a consolidated view of all trading partner components, making it easier for Boomi customers to find, configure, and deploy changes for those partners.
• Support for Multiple Trading Partners Per Process: Organizations can add their company’s profile for each standard in the Trading Partner component and be confident that the right standard will be used for each partner.
• Enhanced Value-Added Network (VAN) Support: Boomi has enhanced the ease-of-use and flexibility of its support for VANs—hosted service offerings that act as an intermediary between business partners sharing standards or proprietary data via shared business processes. Now, a single process can use multiple VANs.
• Support for Additional, Global EDI Standards: Boomi has extended its standards compliance with support from RosettaNet and Tradacoms.

Benefits of a Modern B2B/EDI network

• Support Key EDI Standards: Achieve built-in support for a wide variety of traditional and modern EDI standards, including XML, X12, EDIFACT, HC7, RosettaNet, Tradacoms, as well as the ability to define custom standards.
• Industry Standard Connectivity: Support the full range of trading partner communications— AS2 (Drummond certified), FTP/Secure FTP, or Web Services using SOAP or HTML.
• Management of Trading Partner Framework: Set up and manage all trading partner components from one console to quickly find, configure, and deploy changes for your partner communications.
• Unified View of Partner Network Transactions: Easily generate detailed reports for any of your EDI transactions to simplify tracking, error resolution, and reconciliation.
• Rapid Partner Onboarding: Quickly bring new partners into your network via the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, virtually eliminating data errors and reducing onboarding time from weeks to hours.

7 Tips to Help You Get Started

To ensure a successful B2B platform and process modernization, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Brainstorm with your team on how you can optimize your B2B process to support a better customer experience/user design learning approach.
2. Choose one area to pilot, such as the supplier for a new product.
3. Never do a “big bang” implementation for B2B-EDI in order to avoid the risks of business interruptions.
4. Map the value streams; measure the time for each activity and start optimizing the most time-consuming tasks.
5. Discuss what can be changed and brainstorm alternatives, such as implementing Boomi Flow and chatbots to interact with your partner ecosystem.
6. Pilot Boomi as your B2B platform and leverage Perficient’s B2B/EDI, API, workflow automation, and data transformation experts to reduce your total cost of ownership and prepare for the next wave of business challenges.
7. Keep an eye on trending B2B innovations.

Why Perficient

Perficient is a Boomi Select Partner with deep expertise in key technologies that support IT modernization. Our expertise, coupled with Boomi’s innovative, cloud-native platform, delivers increased value, low cost of ownership, and drives better, faster outcomes for our clients.

Learn more about our Boomi partnership here.

EDI remains an indispensable technology that has evolved gradually over the last 50 years, but many EDI products are showing their age. EDI is at the heart of business transactions between corporations and their business partners, however, businesses have changed drastically since the EDI standard got its start in the military in the late 1940s.

Over the past several decades, the digital economy has become the economy and supply chains are global. Now is the time for businesses to keep pace with these changes, but to do so, it is essential to understand B2B processes and technologies and how to optimize them. In this blog, we will explore Boomi’s EDI Management Platform and how you can get started with modernizing your EDI network.

Boomi’s B2B/EDI Management Platform capabilities

Boomi’s low-code development platform allows companies to easily set up and manage B2B integrations, onboard partners, and integrate EDI with their existing processes and legacy applications. By breaking down traditional EDI silos and centralizing application-to-application, B2B, and API management, Boomi allows customers to maximize the return on their EDI investments. Increased transparency into EDI transactions allows for quick responses and improves interactions with partners.

Building on the success of its existing platform, Boomi has extended its set of EDI management features to further simplify and speed up how companies build and manage their trading partner networks. The enhancements include:

• Empowering Business Users for Operational Agility: Boomi enables business users to add, remove, or change specific parts of an EDI configuration to respond to business requirements, thus increasing business agility and responsiveness.
• More Reusable Components: Reusing common EDI components increases flexibility, reduces duplication, and simplifies updates. This is particularly valuable for companies with varied lines of businesses, semi-autonomous business units, or units acquired through mergers and acquisitions.
• Programmatic On-Boarding for Trading Partners via Boomi APIs: Boomi EDI simplifies and speeds up on-boarding, reducing the time required from weeks to hours.
• Trading Partner Reporting Portal: The new Boomi portal provides authorized users essential EDI documentation. Users can easily add filters to track documents or discover materials associated with a document’s lifecycle. Users can track documents by key number, PO number, customer number, or other document attributes.
• Trading Partner Management UI: The Boomi Trading Partner Management user interface provides a consolidated view of all trading partner components, making it easier for Boomi customers to find, configure, and deploy changes for those partners.
• Support for Multiple Trading Partners Per Process: Organizations can add their company’s profile for each standard in the Trading Partner component and be confident that the right standard will be used for each partner.
• Enhanced Value-Added Network (VAN) Support: Boomi has enhanced the ease-of-use and flexibility of its support for VANs—hosted service offerings that act as an intermediary between business partners sharing standards or proprietary data via shared business processes. Now, a single process can use multiple VANs.
• Support for Additional, Global EDI Standards: Boomi has extended its standards compliance with support from RosettaNet and Tradacoms.

Benefits of modernizing your B2B/EDI network

• Support Key EDI Standards: Achieve built-in support for a wide variety of traditional and modern EDI standards, including XML, X12, EDIFACT, HC7, RosettaNet, Tradacoms, as well as the ability to define custom standards.
• Industry Standard Connectivity: Support the full range of trading partner communications— AS2 (Drummond certified), FTP/Secure FTP, or Web Services using SOAP or HTML.
• Management of Trading Partner Framework: Set up and manage all trading partner components from one console to quickly find, configure, and deploy changes for your partner communications.
• Unified View of Partner Network Transactions: Easily generate detailed reports for any of your EDI transactions to simplify tracking, error resolution, and reconciliation.
• Rapid Partner On-Boarding: Quickly bring new partners into your network via the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, virtually eliminating data errors and reducing on-boarding time from weeks to hours.

7 Tips to help you modernize your B2B processes

To ensure a successful B2B platform and process modernization, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Brainstorm with your team on how you can optimize your B2B process to support a better customer experience/user design learning approach.
2. Choose one area to pilot, such as the supplier for a new product.
3. Never do a “big bang” implementation for B2B-EDI in order to avoid the risks of business interruptions.
4. Map the value streams; measure the time for each activity and start optimizing the most time-consuming tasks.
5. Discuss what can be changed and brainstorm alternatives, such as implementing Boomi Flow and chatbots to interact with your partner ecosystem.
6. Pilot Boomi as your B2B platform and leverage Perficient’s B2B/EDI, API, workflow automation, and data transformation experts to reduce your total cost of ownership and prepare for the next wave of business challenges.
7. Keep an eye on trending B2B innovations.

Why Perficient

Perficient has a strong partnership and implementation experience with Boomi, offering key technologies which support IT modernization. Our expertise coupled with Boomi’s innovative cloud-native platform, delivers increased value, a low total cost of ownership, and drives better, faster outcomes, for our customers.

Learn more about our Boomi partnership here.

Overview

This document demonstrates how continuous build and deploy automation is achieved for IBM Integration Bus deployment using open source GitHub, Jenkins and JFrog Artifactory.

Basic Functionalities

• Full Deployment – Latest code is pulled from GitHub repositories, and each IIB applications are assembled, packed, override properties applied then deployed to respective Integration Server (Execution Group) on IIB nodes.
• Assemble and Deploy by Application Name – Latest code for the given Application is pulled from GitHub repository. It is then assembled, packed, override properties applied then deployed to respective Integration Server (Execution Group) on IIB nodes
• Deploy Only – Latest bar file is taken from Git repository and after the environment specific bar override applied, the overridden bar file is deployed to respective Integration Server (Execution Group) on IIB nodes
• Assemble and Build – Latest code for the given Application is pulled from GitHub repository. It is then assembled, packed, and compiled. The newly created bar file is published to the Artifactory. In this option, deployment will not happen.
• Deploy from Artifactory – Works only with “Deploy Only” option, when this option is selected bar file is downloaded from Artifactory (by default latest bar file for the given application is downloaded. Bar file can also be downloaded by specifying the target build number)
• Continuous Build and Deployment
  • Scheduled Build Trigger – the build job gets triggered automatically by a scheduler at the scheduled time.
  • Build when a change is pushed to GitHub – the build job gets triggered automatically every time when there is a change pushed by someone to IIB GitHub repositories.

Build Environments

• IBM Integration Bus v9.0.0.6 (IBM Integration Bus v10.*) – Dev platform
• Jenkins v2.0 – for continuous integrations
• GitHub – for version control (eGit plugin can be installed on top of IIB Toolkit for source code management. i.e pull/push changes from/to Git respository)
• Apache ANT v1.9.7 – for build automation
• JFrog Artifactory 13.2 – Artifact Repository Manager for archiving the build artifacts

Refer the attached document DevOps-IIB_BuildAndDeploy_Automation_v1.2 for step-by-step configuration setup. Do let me know if you have any comments or need help. Thanks for reading.

While setting up the Websphere Cast Iron virtual appliance, it’s a common issue that password for “admin” is unknown (or the provided password would not work). And there is no information anywhere on how to reset the password before logging into the virtual appliance. I have gone through this issue and figured out a way to reset the password. Please find attached the instructions document on how to reset the password for “admin”.

Resetting_Password_WebsphereCastIron_VirtualAppliance