Get to Know Anypoint Partner Manager
Learning Objectives
After finishing this module, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the need to modernize B2B ecosystems.
- Explain the benefits of using Partner Manager.
- Identify the main Partner Manager components.
The Growing Need to Modernize B2B Ecosystems
As the global B2B ecosystem expands at a rapid rate, legacy B2B integration systems no longer meet the standards for efficient transactions. And they struggle to keep pace with today’s B2B world.
These legacy systems are typically rigid and slow to adapt to customer preferences, leading to challenges in managing B2B transactions and trading partner infrastructures. They also hamper organizations’ efforts toward digital transformation. B2B integration requirements also continue to expand beyond traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) messaging, with customers looking to use APIs to engage with their business partners. As a result, the push to modernize the B2B partner ecosystem is more important than ever.
How Partner Manager Modernizes B2B Ecosystems
To achieve successful digital transformation and modernize antiquated ecosystems, B2B organizations like sneaker manufacturer Cloud Kicks are taking an API-first approach to bring systems together into a composable application network. This means developing software with independent, interchangeable building blocks or modules. And to best achieve that goal, Cloud Kicks has turned to MuleSoft’s Anypoint Partner Manager.
Partner Manager is a simplified, configuration-driven integration platform that enables Cloud Kicks to conduct two-way B2B transactions through modern APIs, traditional EDI formats, or both. What’s more is it enables users to adhere to an API-led approach while exchanging EDI data between different B2B business partners.
As a cloud-native, low-code B2B solution, Partner Manager provides many benefits to Cloud Kicks. It offers seamless integration with B2B partner ecosystems and accelerates partner onboarding and operational management. Partner Manager also provides tools for managing partner relationships, provisioning, and monitoring. Last but not least, it simplifies the process of connecting with external parties and streamlines collaboration through a single unified interface.
Because it greatly reduces the need for custom code, Partner Manager makes it easier and more cost-effective for Cloud Kicks to scale its B2B business and modernize its B2B integrations to move at the speed required today.
Here are some of the ways Cloud Kicks uses Partner Manager.
- Speeding up partner onboarding.
- Future-proofing B2B connectivity.
- Gaining deeper operational and business insights.
- Taking advantage of full visibility into all B2B partner transactions.
- Tracing ransactions end-to-end across B2B and system layers.
Message and Transport Protocols
As organizations trade globally with business partners, they need to meet broad interoperability requirements to grow their network. Partner Manager, along with the Anypoint Platform solutions used by Partner Manager, supports these B2B message and transport protocols, enabling low-code and configuration-driven onboarding of B2B trading partners.
-
Message formats: EDI X12, including VICS and UCS, EDIFACT, XML, JSON, and CSV/Delimited files
-
Transport protocols: AS2, SFTP, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS
Let’s take a look at an enterprise application network featuring Partner Manager.
In addition to using Partner Manager to manage B2B message exchanges involving the message formats and transport protocols, Cloud Kicks can use Anypoint Platform’s standard integration capabilities to build B2B workflows that require message formats such as HL7, RosettaNet, Flat files, and AVRO, and transport protocols like FTPS and RNIF.
Partner Manager Components
Let’s explore how Cloud Kicks applies the four main components of Partner Manager.
- Host
- Partner
- Third-party connection
- Message flow and its component
Cloud Kicks sells stylish custom sneakers that are a hit with celebrities and professional athletes, not to mention people who attend a certain popular tech conference in San Francisco. Cloud Kicks receives purchase order transactions from its partners in one of the supported message formats (EDI X12, EDIFACT, XML, JSON, or CSV) through a supported protocol (AS2, SFTP, FTP, or HTTP/s). Cloud Kicks built its application network by using API-led connections between its organization and its core systems, including ERP.
This diagram depicts Cloud Kicks’s B2B order-to-cash workflow enabled by Partner Manager. B2B organizations can implement a similar pattern for other common supply chain workflows such as procurement, logistics, and warehouse and transportation management.
A host is your Anypoint Platform organization or business group. Like all Partner Manager implementations, Cloud Kicks has a single host for which they define a host profile that consists of the EDI and AS2 identifiers used by its organization.
Partners are those with whom Cloud Kicks sends and receives B2B transmissions. Cloud Kicks defines partner profiles for each partner in its B2B ecosystem.
Third-party connections manage B2B connectivity with your organization on behalf of your partners. Cloud Kicks doesn’t have any third-party connections.
Message flows are the paths through which a B2B message travels from its source to its target. Cloud Kicks set up message flows to send and receive messages between the company and its partners. There are two types of message flows.
-
Inbound message flows receive messages from partners, including messages that go through third-party connections. When you create an inbound message flow, you can validate and transform the inbound messages and then send them to your back-end applications.
-
Outbound message flows receive messages from your back-end applications, validate and transform these messages to the format your partners expect, and then send them to your partners, either directly or through third-party connections.
Message Flow Components
Let’s explore message flows in more detail. Message flows consist of these main components.
- Endpoints
- Message types
- Sender and receiver identifiers
- Translation maps
Endpoints define the transport protocol configurations necessary for sending and receiving messages to and from external partners or internal back-end applications.
HTTP-based receive endpoints created in Partner Manager can be managed from Anypoint API Manager, enabling superior security controls and policy management. Managing the endpoints in Anypoint API Manager also enables the B2B message exchange specifications to be documented in Anypoint Exchange and then published to external portals via Anypoint Experience Hub—which partners can access to onboard themselves.
Message types define the structure of the transactions that Partner Manager receives or sends. Message type definitions can include custom message attributes with mappings to extract key business fields like Order Number, Invoice Number, and Shipment ID.
Sender and receiver identifiers determine the sender and receiver identifiers in AS2, EDIFACT, and X12 transactions. For X12 messages, the identifiers in the ISA and GS headers provide information that identifies the appropriate flow to process the transaction.
Translation maps are DataWeave maps that transform business transactions between your partner’s message formats and your organization’s enterprise application message formats. You create the maps in Studio and import them into Partner Manager when you configure message flows.
Now you know the basic components of Partner Manager and how Cloud Kicks applies the many benefits of the Partner Manager solution. Next, take a look at how Cloud Kicks sets up its Partner Manager environment.