The business partner relationship allows organizations to interact with each other on the TradeLens platform.
In this article
Background
TradeLens has hundreds of different organizations using it on a daily basis, but only some of these are relevant to you. To simplify your experience on TradeLens, you are able to build and manage your own connections to relevant organizations. We call these connections “Business Partner Relationships”
You can only transfer an eBL in your possession to a company with whom you have a business partner relationship, and likewise can only be transferred an eBL with those you have a connection with.
You can add new business partners from the TradeLens network, allowing you to interact with them on the platform.
The feature can be used through the UI or through the Business Partners API and requires organization admin authority.
Business partner functions
Business partner functions include:
- An organization has the option of being “searchable” or not.
- An organization can search and invite the companies that are also part of the TradeLens platform to become business partners.
- An organization can refer to a partner using a party identifier, either user-specified, or system generated.
- The ability to add a business rule that can be used to automatically and consistently grant this business partner access to shipment data. This is based on a specified set of conditions.
- An organization has the option to either accept or reject the partnership requests.
By default, organizations are set to auto-accept any new business partner request. Any updates can be managed in the Account's Organization Management.
Once a business partnership has been established, the party identifier can be used to give the party access to a trade object, like a shipment, consignment, or transport equipment. Either a user-specified party identifier or the system-generated party identifier can be used.
States of partnership
A business partnership can be in different states:
- Requested: When the sender has sent a new request to establish a business partnership and the recipient has not yet taken an action
- Pending: The recipient will see this status for requests that have been sent to them but have not yet been actioned
- Accepted: The status for an accepted and active business partnership
- Denied: The status for a denied request
- Deleted: When a user deletes a previously accepted and active business partnership
