Today marks a big step forward in SAP’s mission to deliver the solutions organizations need to extend digitalization beyond the four walls of their businesses – transforming today’s fragmented supply chains into unified, collaborative, and intelligent networks.
Businesses can no longer focus on only digitalizing their internal processes. Achieving true agility and resiliency in today’s networked economy requires a network strategy that enables organizations to collaborate with their most critical trading partners and see into their supply chains.
Today at SAPPHIRE NOW, we announced SAP Business Network, an innovative new solution that reimagines how businesses collaborate with their network of trading partners and will empower companies to unify all the points of interaction and integration across that network to move faster and smarter than ever before.
The first major innovation milestone for SAP Business Network, a unified trading partner portal delivering new collaboration scenarios and enabling greater responsiveness, is now available.
The unified experience provides trading partners with a holistic view into all their customer relationships and transactions on the network. On its home page, the all new workbench enables users to customize their experience and maximize their responsiveness to customer needs. Key capabilities of the new SAP Business Network trading partner experience available now include:
- Centralized access to explore and collaborate with customers
- Intelligent trading partner onboarding and registration and new collaboration scenarios
- Highly configurable workbench enabling user-based personalization by role
In addition to the new trading partner experience, buyers and trading partners can collaborate using shared data and workflows, applying network-wide intelligence to inform decisions. New services are also being made available to trading partners, such as working capital financing. Additional capabilities planned for availability later this year include:
- Real-time global track and trace integrated to the purchase order application, enhancing supply chain visibility
- New working capital solution for trading partners with SAP Supplier Financing, providing access to a network of lenders to help improve cash flow
- Insights and benchmarking to compare performance with industry peers, improving customer service
And we will continue to execute on our vision for SAP Business Network, integrating SAP’s leading business networks — including Ariba Network, SAP Logistics Business Network, and SAP Asset Intelligence Network — to unify business processes across supplier collaboration, logistics coordination and traceability, and asset intelligence. This strategy will help customers and their trading partners to become more agile and resilient in the face of changing market dynamics and increasingly complex supply chains as well as drive better business outcomes.
Trading Partners Report Success
Customer feedback and input is crucial as SAP integrates and evolves the individual market-leading networks into a truly unmatched unified business network. We collaborated with our customers to guide the design and development of the new trading partner portal with their most important needs in mind. Their continued feedback has been invaluable and will continue to inform future innovations for SAP Business Network.
Here is what some of them had to say about their participation in our early adopter program:
“SAP Business Network allows us to communicate with our customers in real-time. The reliability of the platform gives us unparalleled visibility and connectivity with our most critical customers even in changing business environments.”
— Ray Pan, IT Customer Technology Manager, Komatsu Mining Corp. Group
“Technological change in the way of doing business has been happening for some time, and the current global situation has accelerated this process. Today more than ever we need to be at the forefront of this transformation. SAP Business Network has helped us develop more efficient formulas in order to better respond to the needs of the industry.”
— David Labbe, Digital Business Manager, Reliper Comercial Ltda.
A unified network will enable all trading partners to leverage combined intelligence to apply learning from past experiences to future decisions, ultimately driving success across the board. Because when a network reaches across functions, across industries, across the world, companies have the power to reshape how business gets done, including collaborating to solve some of today’s biggest social, economic, and environmental issues.
To learn more, visit the SAP Business Network area of sap.com.
John Wookey is president of Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.