B2B Interoperability Approach

Discover Drummond’s Best Practices for Interoperability

Drummond is the pioneer and market leader in application conformance and interoperability testing services with more than 750 software applications tested for over 400 software solution providers. If your organization needs to test critical business applications for standards conformance and B2B interoperability, here are some key things to consider and why the Drummond approach may be right for you and your business.

What is interoperability testing and why is it important?

Interoperability testing is important to ensure that your supply chain can efficiently operate even when your partners are using applications developed by different software vendors. Just because a product is “conformant” or “compliant” to a standard does NOT mean that it’s interoperable. For companies engaged in the growing electronic commerce marketplace, software interoperability is vital, and its absence can strongly inhibit supply chain implementations and add significant supply chain costs.

The exchange of vital information at a proven security level between automotive dealers, manufacturers and RSPs is critical for the automotive sector to meet the demands of a changing world. This requires the move toward new technical communication environments that share common data messaging standards in the supporting software. 

What is the difference between compliance testing versus interoperability testing?

Compliance means “I followed the technical specifications” and is generally tested against one software reference implementation. Interoperability testing goes one step further because it means each party is both compliant and can interoperate with each other party according to a subset of the standard. Interoperability testing is done among all participating software products. When an important communication is needed, an interoperable software product will ensure the communication will be there reliably and securely. It will work when needed.

Interoperability testing goes further than compliance testing by ensuring that software solutions from different vendors can communicate thereby reducing integration and implementation costs. For example, the retail industry found compliance insufficient and made a strategic decision to roll-out only interoperability tested software in their supply chains. This was critical to successfully automating the exchange of millions of dollars of invoices and purchase orders on a daily basis.

Best practices which can be applied to automotive supply chains are:

• Confirm that each party’s software is compliant with the technical standard
• Reach solid agreement on a compliance profile, or subset of a complex standard
• Confirm each party’s software can interoperate with each and every other party over the profile

What is Drummond’s Interoperability Compliance Process?

This is a methodology for testing that software applications created by different vendors can communicate with each other. Drummond tests every product-with-version against all the other products-with -version involved in a specific test round. Drummond has done extensive work in the world of interoperability, having tested products from more than 350 software products since 1999 which support these Internet messaging standards: AS1, AS2, AS3, ebXML messaging vs 2.0 and CPFR®. Drummond’s reach extends across the globe as companies based in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas have participated in interoperability testing.

How are Drummond’s interoperability tests performed?

Drummond’s software testing services provide a critical link by ensuring that multiple software products are interoperable. Furthermore, Drummond continues to mediate the resolution of interoperability problems, if they occur, between Drummond-tested products in the industry.

Since 1999, Drummond has specialized in interoperability tests, cross testing all participating products against each other to ensure interoperability among all products in the test round. Products that pass testing not only comply with the standard and work against a reference platform but interoperate with one another. The testing process, as well as detailed test results for each product and standard, is available at: Certified Products Directory

In addition to a team of experienced developers, Drummond also offers automated testing software called InSitu. If your initiative requires ongoing periodic verification of interoperability across versions, InSitu can provide valuable savings in manpower, time and costs.