Major global disruptions, such as the financial crisis of 2008, catastrophic climate events in Japan and Thailand, and most recently the novel coronavirus, have exposed the interdependency of the modern supply chain. What may appear as a minor disruption – a strike, a factory fire, a material shortage – can have ripple effects across the supply chain, causing significant negative impacts on customers further downstream.
Managing supply chain risk has never been easy and although an increasing number of companies are investing to upgrade their supply chain risk management capabilities, we still see that supply chain resiliency has not kept pace with rising levels of logistical complexity. Developing a more systematic, focused, and proactive approach requires a coordinated effort across compliance, performance management, risk measurement, and risk resilience – for the entire global supply base.
Measuring and Monitoring Supplier Performance
Historically, companies have used manual processes and spreadsheets to understand supplier performance and manage supplier risks. While managing this data is crucial to identifying pain points and predicting supplier success, it can be tedious to record, analyze, and report this data by hand.
That is why leading companies are investing in supplier risk management programs that use e-sourcing and contract processes and applying data from those solutions to further support their programs. Companies should evaluate the cost of lost business versus the cost of investment in supply chain resilience. Contract compliance, risk assessment, innovation, and purchase order (PO) invoice matching are other important factors that help measure and monitor supplier performance.
How Application Extension Partners Can Help
SAP’s robust partner ecosystem has all the tools needed to power an intelligent enterprise. Application extension partners fill the gaps created by company-, industry-, or geography-specific requirements. Each partner brings its own unique blend of expertise, skills, and services to deliver solutions SAP customers need. They enhance customer experiences by speeding up time to value and the delivery of innovations across the entire procurement portfolio. SAP App Center makes it easy to find the solution right for you – simply search using the filters, try solutions, and then buy the ones that will extend your existing SAP Ariba solutions and help you become a best-run business.
Contract Compliance
Contract compliance is an essential part of any company’s risk management strategy. It helps ensure that suppliers, buyers, and employees stick to the terms laid out in their contracts, and protects an organization from fraud, corruption, and rogue spending. Be proactive in identifying and solving errors in contractual obligations throughout the source-to-settle process. Icertis Contract Management (ICM) and pricing and quote information found in SAP Customer Experience helps enable users to drive faster sales contract cycle times. ICM is the leading contract life-cycle management solution for advanced contracting capabilities.
Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is one of the most important investments a business can make. Analyzing data trends and patterns leads to valuable insights that inform key decisions at every level in the source-to-pay process. See into the future by using predictive analytics to identify potential supplier sustainability risks and stay ahead of supply chain disruption. Partners providing modern predictive analytics, like RapidRatings, recognize these key trends, patterns, and potential disruptions within supply chains. Protect your enterprise’s most valuable assets while also creating sophisticated risk mitigation models.
Innovation
Drive product design development, cost savings, and system improvements to optimize business processes. Dive into end-to-end processes to improve efficiency and take control of business automation through powerful insights. Celonis uses data-based process discovery, identifying optimization opportunities through intuitive visualizations that provide a transparent look into their operative processes. The SAP Process Mining application by Celonis helps business owners identify weaknesses and areas of opportunity across the value chain.
PO-Invoice Matching
Control your view into accounts payable compliance using cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI). AppZen uses AI to track issues in the spend management processes. When integrated seamlessly with SAP Ariba, AppZen provides actionable data insights into supplier behavior as well as real-time audits before you pay. Enforce compliance, make data-informed decisions, and discover discrepancies between your PO, invoice, and contract.
Visit the SAP App Center to learn more about how application extension partners can help your enterprise. Have extensions that will bring value to the SAP Ariba ecosystem? Apply here to be a partner today.
Bob Baker is global vice president, Application Extension Partners, SAP Procurement.