Every enterprise runs on B2B transactions—purchase orders, invoices, payments, and shipping notices that form the heartbeat of modern commerce. Yet behind the green dashboards and monitoring tools, there’s a hidden crisis costing organizations between 1% and 5% of EBITDA annually. Purchase orders go missing, invoices don’t reconcile, and payments stall without explanation. The culprit isn’t lack of technology—it’s the “assurance gap,” the space between knowing something happened and proving it happened correctly. In today’s hybrid landscape of EDI, APIs, cloud ERPs, and event streaming, each system captures part of the truth, but none can see the whole story.
Monitoring tools show that transactions have moved. Observability platforms show how they moved. But neither can prove they moved correctly—and that gap is now a board-level priority. A new capability called B2B flow intelligence is emerging to solve this, overlaying existing systems to correlate, track, and prove transaction continuity from order to settlement. Organizations implementing this approach are seeing 50-70% reductions in reconciliation effort, millions protected from chargebacks, and 60% faster audit preparation. The shift is clear: enterprises no longer just need to observe their B2B flows—they need to prove them.
Read the full article by Andrew Mallaband.