This document summarizes IBM's Partner Engagement Manager (PEM) cloud-based solution for managing business-to-business partnerships and communities. PEM aims to help companies streamline traditionally manual and disjointed partner onboarding, management, and collaboration processes. It provides capabilities for faster onboarding, centralized monitoring and control of partner activities, and internal and partner self-service options. The goal is to help companies transform their B2B relationships from inefficient and costly to innovative sources of growth.

1. White Paper
B2B Cloud ServicesIBM B2B Commerce
IBM Partner
Engagement Manager
Transform your B2B community with faster, simpler
onboarding, management and collaboration
From chaos to control in B2B management
In today’s global business-to-business (B2B) landscape, companies
depend on vast networks of suppliers, customers and partners to run
their businesses. How well they manage those engagements—from
selecting the right trading partners to collaborating with those
organizations—directly influences revenue growth and profit margin.
As the global and digital nature of business intensified over the past
few decades, companies took the most expedient tactical route to
establishing the connections they needed with trading partners.
Without a centralized, unified infrastructure for establishing these
ecosystems, companies have had no choice but to manually orchestrate
multiple systems, tools and networks, resulting in a heavy reliance on
resource-intensive manual processes.
The mixture of disparate systems and processes typically gets the job
done, but it’s disjointed, cumbersome and constraining. It slows time to
revenue, limits opportunities for growth and drives up personnel costs.
To gain competitive advantage through B2B communities, sponsor
organizations need a centralized point of control to manage and
monitor onboarding, as well as ongoing interactions with their
community. With the right approach and technology, companies can
move from chaos to control in B2B management, unleashing
innovation and turning B2B communities from cost centers into
catalysts for bottom-line growth.
Contents
1 From chaos to control in
B2B management
2 The rising challenges in trading
partner networks
4 IBM PEM: A modern system
of engagement
5 Faster onboarding and
activity management
5 Internal and trading partner
self-service
6 Ongoing activity monitoring
and control
7 A roadmap to B2B
community value

2. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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The rising challenges in trading
partner networks
B2B communities are essential for the modern business.
In a survey for IBM by the research consultancy Vanson
Bourne, 81 percent of business managers rated B2B
integration as either strategic to the business or important
for selected processes.1
Trading partners increasingly expect
electronic automation, and sponsor organizations that labor
ahead with uncoordinated manual processes stand to incur
high costs and jeopardize market share.
To meet the demand, many organizations have invested
heavily to improve their capacity for B2B onboarding and
management. Yet strategic business users continue to struggle
with B2B integration interfaces and processes, as well as the
complexity of multiple back-end applications, including
enterprise resource planning (ERP), procurement, managed
file transfer, asset management, and more.
Now, emerging systems based around cloud, big data, mobile,
and social technologies are introducing new variables into the
equation. These four converging dynamics present abundant
opportunities to improve value chain performance, yet they
also create additional complexity for both line of business and
IT leaders.
In a survey by Vanson Bourne, IT professionals said
that they expect the impact of cloud, big data, mobile
and social on B2B integration requirements to be significant,
with cloud-based systems having the greatest effect
(See Figure 1). New requirements on top of fragmented
processes are exacerbating the challenges that organizations
have traditionally faced in working effectively with
trading partners:
Figure 1: Impact of cloud, big data, mobile and social on B2B
integration requirements.
Source: IBM survey of IT professionals by Vanson Bourne.2
Cloud 62%
43%
40%
39%
4%
Big data
Mobile
Social
No impact
from any of
the above
Impact on B2B integration

3. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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For many years, IBM has innovated and helped global
organizations simplify B2B processes through an increase in
the speed and effectiveness of value chain management. IBM
is building on that success with the introduction of IBM
Partner Engagement Manager (PEM), a new cloud-based
solution that enables enterprises to transform global B2B
engagement by accelerating processes, controlling
information and leveraging relationships.
• Onboarding new trading partners is manual and
expensive. It involves many touch points and significant
labor expense that directly impacts the bottom line.
Every day that a member of the community is not up and
running is another day that a part of the value chain is not
generating revenue. At organizations with hundreds or
thousands of partners in the onboarding queue, these
issues can be particularly severe.
• Organizations lack a centralized management
mechanism. Getting a holistic view of operational
performance and risk levels across the B2B community
is often painful and time-consuming. In addition, by the
time needed information is manually gathered and
presented to management, it is often already out of date.
• Businesses miss opportunities for collaboration and
innovation. Since interactions are cumbersome and
expensive, many organizations keep the number of
interactions to a minimum. B2B communities have great
potential for exchanging ideas on collaboration, innovation
and efficiencies, yet for the vast majority of organizations,
the potential is untapped.
• Risk management is compromised. Particularly in
supplier communities, the ability to conduct risk
assessments based on timely and accurate risk profiles is
critical to avoiding interruptions because of financial,
quality, labor, political, and natural conditions. Without a
clear view of supplier risk, organizations face the prospect
of disruptions that can damage profitability and brand
image while forcing costly contingency measures.
Accelerate
• Faster time to revenue
• Quicker resolution
Control
• Enforcement of process and
compliance standards
• Centralized ecosystem establishment
Leverage
• Nurture and transform relationships in your
partner community
• Enable and promote self service engagement
Transform and continuously optimize
global B2B engagement
IBM Partner Engagement Manager
Benefits
Figure 2: IBM PEM supplies capabilities to streamline and accelerate global
B2B engagement.

4. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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IBM PEM: A modern system
of engagement
As the world has grown more global and digital, leading
enterprises no longer think in terms of the traditional
systems of record they’ve utilized for years. Today, we see
a heightened focus on collaboration and tighter, more
transparent relationships with trading partners. IBM PEM
focuses on providing a dynamic system of engagement while
also providing a system of record for the partner data that is
related to the various B2B integration components that are
part of every supply and value chain.
PEM key capabilities
• Business user self-service for sponsors and partners
• Secure role-based permissions and activities
• Portal for sponsor/partner interactions
• Collaborative activity framework and built-in tasks
• Dashboard and reporting on key metrics
• Instant alerting to problem areas
• APIs for integration with internal/external applications
IBM Partner Engagement Manager is a
system of engagement that enables sponsor organizations to
connect with their B2B communities in easier, faster and
more streamlined ways. As an open, customizable and
extensible engagement hub that replaces chaos with order
and control, IBM PEM is engineered to help improve
operational performance and reduce risk while accelerating
time to revenue.
Three key focus areas for IBM PEM are faster onboarding
and activity management, internal and trading partner
self-service, and ongoing activity monitoring and control.
Figure 3. IBM PEM supplies a complete platform for enterprise
partner engagement.

5. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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Faster onboarding and
activity management
Onboarding a new supplier, customer or partner is the first
obstacle to effective B2B integration, and it’s also one of the
most painful for many organizations. More than 70 percent of
business managers report that IT either struggles to support
the volume of trading partners their organizations need to
onboard, or cannot support trading partners’ technical
onboarding requirements, according to an IBM study.3
IBM PEM gives business users new capabilities to
onboard and provision large numbers of trading partners
at once, or in one-off fashion as needed. Workflow-driven
processes reduce manual steps, errors and delays for both
sponsors and partners, helping build a foundation for a
positive relationship. Self-service for business users helps
streamline the full onboarding lifecycle:
• Activity creation. A simple drag-and-drop interface
enables business users in the sponsor organization to detail
exactly what data is required, with specific workflow steps
and approval checkpoints defined.
• Target group definition and rollout. Custom
attributes enable pinpoint targeting of specific subsets
of the community for each campaign; with a few clicks,
notification is sent out to the targeted group within the
B2B community.
• Supplier/customer/partner response. Once notification
is received, trading partners provide data as outlined
within PEM and submit the information back to the
sponsor organization.
• Activity completion and approval. Assuming all
information has been provided as requested by members of
the targeted group, the activity can be marked as approved
and closed.
View a quick discussion on how Partner Engagement
Manager allows for dynamic onboarding of your business
partners. https://ibm.biz/BdFFei
Internal and trading partner self-service
While every organization has similar pains around onboarding
and interacting with their B2B community, the exact steps and
approvals they want to execute will vary. It’s important that
these steps can be crafted, tuned and executed by business
users. PEM addresses this challenge with a business user
self-service model.
All tasks can be easily created and connected in a series of
steps with simple drag-and-drop actions. For instance,
business users at the sponsor organization can create the
dialogs that B2B community members will see. They can
direct the look and feel, presenting exactly what information
is requested, and the timeline or due dates for completing the
information. They can customize the partner-facing interface
using their logo and other design elements for a customized,
branded experience. Customers can also preview the
interaction that their partners and internal users will
experience using the “Test” function that provide a real view
into exactly how the interface will appear to their partners.
Figure 4. A drag-and-drop activity design interface in IBM PEM empower
business users to have complete control over B2B community interactions.

6. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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Figure 5. A centralized monitoring dashboard shows the status of activities
at any given time.
In addition, IBM PEM enables the creation of groups
representing specific subsets of a B2B community by such
criteria as geographic location or revenue size. Groups
and their defining criteria are fully customizable, enabling
sponsors to build communities with common interests or
reach out to specific members with offers, surveys and
other messages.
For suppliers, customers, and partners, IBM PEM delivers a
web-based self-service offering that allows a partner to
manage their account details and participation in the B2B
community. In addition, the sponsor is also able to empower
all of their partners or targeted partners with the ability to
drive selected activities from a self-service option. This
enables a partner to update information on their own when
something has changed rather than waiting for an activity to
rolled out to them by their sponsor.
With deadlines and input required of trading partners,
automated alerts allow sponsor organizations to drive higher
engagement levels and help cultivate active participants in a
dynamic B2B community.
Ongoing activity monitoring and control
For the sponsor organization, PEM provides a centralized
monitoring dashboard showing progress across
activities—typically multiple campaigns in parallel targeting
hundreds if not thousands of members of the B2B community.
At a glance, the sponsor organization can see which activities
are completed and which are still outstanding, gaining the
real-time visibility needed to maximize payback from the
B2B community.
It’s then easy to drill down into specific campaigns to
understand and address any problem areas. Business users can
also segment trading partners by such attributes as geography,
revenue contribution, uniqueness of offering, and more.
Reporting enables rapid answers to such questions as how
many partners have responded to the latest campaign or how
many are not compliant with certificate requirements, while
automated alerts highlight areas needing attention.
Meanwhile, the ability to reuse activities and groups once
they have been defined can help sponsor organizations
dramatically improve efficiency. Without the need to recreate
activities from the beginning, sponsors eliminate the status
quo of labor-intensive manual involvement for such common
tasks as validating trading partner security and compliance.
As many activities in B2B communities are recurring,
PEM is designed to support that model in the most
efficient way possible.

7. White Paper
IBM B2B Commerce B2B Cloud Services
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A roadmap to move from B2B chaos to
community value
With open standards-based APIs, PEM is designed for
integration with the systems of record in which sponsor
organizations store critical data on trading partners.
Bi-directional data exchange helps ensure that information
is in sync between back-end applications and PEM to
minimize manual work and delays, while providing timely
and accurate information on trading partner networks.
IBM will deliver prebuilt integrations between PEM
and IBM Sterling solutions for B2B integration and
procurement, respectively, helping to further automate
onboarding processes and accelerate time to value.
Additional functionality will enable sponsor organizations to
offer new communications and collaboration capabilities to
trading partners.
Suppliers, for instance, will be provided with tools to
communicate with the broader supplier community, in
the form of a social interactions hub. Customizability and
extensibility are key characteristics in IBM PEM that enable
organizations to design and direct the interaction experience
for trading partners.
With IBM PEM offering a faster, simpler approach to
B2B community management, sponsor organizations can
move from the chaos that prevails in many B2B environments
toward a system of engagement that pays dividends across
the value chain. Such capabilities will be an important
differentiator for success, today and for years to come.

8. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2016
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Produced in the United States of America
January 2016
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1 IBM, “Bridging the business/IT divide in B2B integration,” May 2014.
2 IBM, “Rethinking B2B integration for cloud, big data, mobile and social,”
May 2014.
3 IBM, “Bridging the business/IT divide in B2B integration,” May 2014.
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