When organizations consolidate the data moving between applications, enable electronic commerce with more trading partners, and automate business processes, they will have a new stream of data to monitor and base decisions upon. Today, many companies are making decisions on how they can improve there operations. There are four layers of visibility and collaboration that must be examined when looking at a long-term business integration strategy.

• IT Infrastructure Visibility - Solutions must be able to offer the technical users the ability to monitor the ongoing integration and processes. More importantly this system should run by exception not by research. This means that if an error occurs anywhere, that the monitoring has the capability to notify the administrator of the exact issue and provide access to adjust and continue the process. This removes the need for a user to have to proactively monitor thousands of transactions.
• Document Exchange Visibility- Solutions must be able to provide the parties involved with the exchange of business information (i.e. Orders, Invoices, Shipping Notices) a portal for visibility and research. This portal can be shared with employees, customers and suppliers. This allows each party to see if their exchange was executed flawlessly or if there were errors that need to be adjusted. Additionally, this information can be used for analytical purposes. For example, a person in the supply chain could research how many transactions were delayed or in error from a specific trading partner. This type of information is invaluable to senior decision makers.
• Business Process Collaboration - By sharing our business process and inviting our partners into our operational model, we move from just allowing access to our information to coordinating actions. One of the common issues that often occurs with the exchange of business documents is invalid information. Solutions are now able to recognize those data errors, alert our partners, and provide them with a portal to correct the information.
• Collaborative Applications - This is by far the most extensive goal that generates the most business benefit. But again, this layer is not possible if the exchange of information is disorganized and error-prone. Once the information is moving correctly, we have the capability to apply logic and rules that can lead to greater business benefits.
  
  Some applications in use today include:
  a. Vendor Managed Inventory
  b. Collaborative, Planning, Forecasting & Replenishment
  c. Supplier Enablement & Rating Portals
  d. RFID- (Radio Frequency Identification) Applications 
      i.  Event Management
      ii. Track & Trace