How to Improve B2B Data Exchange with No-Code Solutions

Many times exchanging data is the first true touchpoint you have with a new partner and it sets the precedent for your working relationship. To make a great impression, your data onboarding process should be as seamless as possible.

But it's difficult to move quickly if your team relies on manual data wrangling. Not surprisingly, a B2B integration survey by Ovum found that enterprises take an average of 23 days to onboard a new partner, with about 40% taking more than 30 days to onboard.

A major reason for this lag? A lack of support. Over 50% of enterprises surveyed agreed that their existing B2B onboarding solutions fail to provide enough support. 

Oftentimes, this support shortage is a direct result of manual customer data onboarding processes. Technical teams are strapped for time as they work to clean, validate, and ingest messy partner data. Support teams have to field emails, track down spreadsheets, and wait for help from dev teams. Data onboarding drags on, and no one benefits from the new partnership.

However, a company that can onboard partner data in a matter of minutes provides a great experience, frees up time for additional support, and creates a faster time-to-value for everyone involved. 

In this post, we'll walk through partner data onboarding, share the common challenges companies face, discuss the benefits of a streamlined process, and show how real companies increased productivity and reduced costs by improving their partner data onboarding. 

What is Partner Data Onboarding?

B2B partner data onboarding is the process of bringing in online and offline partner data into your operational systems. The goal is to integrate the partner data into your existing system so you can begin building a business relationship with them. Unfortunately, handling messy external data slows down the time-to-value, because teams spend weeks cleaning, restructuring, and importing the data.

Painless data onboarding is essential to developing long-term business relationships, but there are a number of challenges that impede the process.

Common Partner Data Onboarding Challenges

Most partner data onboarding is primarily a manual process. Of course, companies want to onboard new partner data as quickly as possible, but manually importing external data is a complex process. Partners and third-party vendors are onboarded through a series of unsecured emails, often with both sides sharing sensitive information back and forth. Then data needs to be cleaned and validated to match your system's schema before it can be imported, which requires a lot of time from engineering and data teams.

These manual processes introduce errors. Without usable data, it's impossible to pull valuable insights from the data. This causes teams to build solutions, such as custom data uploaders, that wind up taking more time away from strategic initiatives and sacrificing your product roadmap.

Unsecure communication, manual data wrangling, and building and maintaining custom solutions all slow down the data onboarding process. Solving these challenges requires your dev, data, and customer support teams, but it also demands time from your partner's teams. 

Onboard Partner Data in Minutes with Osmos

When data onboarding is seamless, both parties immediately see the value of the partnership. For example, Mosaic saved hundreds of engineering hours by partnering with Osmos to use smart data uploaders instead of building a custom data uploader. Another company, Rahi, reduced delivery costs by 60% after swapping a manual copy/paste data onboarding process for an automated data pipeline.

Here's an example of how a fintech company leverages Osmos Pipelines and Osmos Uploaders to handle their partner data onboarding.

Streamline Your Partner Data Onboarding with Osmos

No matter how complex your partner data onboarding needs, our External Data Platform.can streamline your process.

1) Empower end-users

Data onboarding is largely still a manual process that creates silos due to lack of communication and poor organization that leads to incorrectly filed documents or messy data. No-code data transformation enables your partners to clean, validate, and import data no matter how it's provided.‍

2) Ingest clean, structured data

Partner data onboarding requires ingesting data from various sources, such as log files, CSVs, FTPs, or JSONs. No-code data transformation, like Osmos, equips companies to transform any data into a usable, structured format with a few clicks. Since no coding is involved, non-technical teams can offer support if partners have questions.‍

3) Break internal bottlenecks

Partners and third-party vendors have enough on their plate, and you don't want to add more by asking their technical teams to help troubleshoot onboarding issues. With automated data pipelines, your internal teams can easily ingest partner data into your operational systems.‍

4) Reduce costs

‍To onboard partner data, companies often employ dozens of engineers to wrangle the data and make it usable. Before partnering with Osmos, one MarTech company employed a team of 20 engineers dedicated to data wrangling, which cost the company more than $2 million per year. By automating its partner data onboarding process and moving it to low-cost customer support teams, the engineering team could focus on strategic product initiatives. This boosted the company's growth potential and saved more than $1 million per year.‍

5) Improve partner satisfaction

‍The data onboarding process has a significant impact on partner satisfaction, but it usually involves trading FTP+CSVs then manually uploading data files—a terrible experience for all parties. Seamless partner data onboarding solutions can reduce import times to mere minutes, which allows your team to begin using partner data. In turn, overall satisfaction improves from a delightful experience.

Summary

100s of companies leverage Osmos Pipelines and Osmos Uploaders to handle their partner data onboarding. Osmos Uploader provides a self-serve solution to ensure that all data ingested into your system by partners or third parties is cleaned, validated, and ready to use. And with Osmos Pipelines, you can equip your team to automate partner data ingestion, resolve errors, and manage transformations.