The demand for supply chain resilience and agility has never been higher. Procurement and supply chain functions have evolved beyond mere cost management, becoming increasingly crucial to customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and overall business objectives. To navigate this complex environment, companies need comprehensive B2B solutions that foster collaboration and drive efficiency for both themselves and their trading partners.
In a previous article, I explored how SAP Business Network can deliver measurable value for buyer organizations by accelerating order cycles, improving efficiency, and generating significant ROI. Now, I’m turning my attention to the other side of the equation: the suppliers.
A recent IDC white paper sponsored by SAP, The Business Value of SAP Business Network — For Selling Organizations, sheds light on how business networks can help organizations meet key goals by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and driving innovation. Let’s delve into the findings and explore how SAP Business Network can transform the supplier experience.
Cutting costs through visibility and information sharing
Technology plays a critical role in the buyer-supplier relationship. Traditional collaboration tools, designed to bring buyers and sellers together, are increasingly limited in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. To meet new demands, organizations are turning to modern business networks that enable more efficient ways to collaborate with partners.
These networks offer greater convenience, speed, and a broad selection of products and services, transforming how businesses sell products and manage their end-to-end supply chain. To succeed, teams need meaningful visibility into supply chain activity. Discovering opportunities to improve operational efficiencies and deliver business value requires access to real insights across key metrics. Business networks make this possible by enabling end-to-end tracking of orders, shipments, and inventory. This transparency also contributes to stronger collaboration with customers, allowing teams to respond quickly to changes in demand, optimize inventory levels, and maintain more reliable and accurate forecasts.
These benefits can be realized through automation capabilities contained within the platform, bringing further cost savings. For one customer using SAP Business Network, automated order processing eliminated manual checks and data entry, significantly reducing costs. While manually processed orders cost around $30 each, automated orders cost them less than a dollar.
Beyond order processing, automation and data visibility also improved demand forecasting. Users reported a 19% increase in forecast accuracy, which helped reduce stockouts, overproduction, and production waste. These improvements not only delivered operational efficiencies but also contributed to higher renewal rates and new business opportunities.
Driving value while staying efficient
Automation through SAP Business Network helps companies reduce manual tasks, saving employees’ time and resources while improving accuracy, efficiency, and compliance. These process improvements can also enhance employee performance, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks that drive better business outcomes.
Tasks like customer support see major benefits from efficiency gains through business network automation. Structured data ensures deeper integration with other systems, allowing employees to quickly access complete storefront and portfolio data to respond to customer inquiries faster. Business networks can also provide better visibility and near-real-time data, leading to faster, more accurate responses to customer needs and boosting customer satisfaction by nearly 37%. These improvements help reduce product turn-times and allow companies to deliver products promptly, benefiting both employees and customers.
SAP Business Network customers also saw invoice approvals and shipping notices processed 50% and 48% faster with automation compared to manual methods. This also led to a 21% increase in on-time document delivery, reaching 91% overall, highlighting the significant impact of SAP Business Network on operational efficiency.
With fewer errors, faster payments, and enhanced visibility into financial data, automation through SAP Business Network helps procurement teams do more than streamline operations. It can empower them to deliver the added value that companies have been searching for.
Strengthening and streamlining business development efforts
Strong visibility helps teams understand customer needs and use a data-driven approach to identify new opportunities more quickly. Business networks can even help boost a supplier’s profile as well, with certification and trust ratings that help bring in more business. These metrics can help translate new opportunities into bigger picture products and solutions.
Process automation and accelerated payments inherently increase customer value by responding to their needs faster. At the same time, they give organizations additional time to reach and maintain more customers to drive growth through new agreements that could allow them to scale further. SAP Business Network helped customers accelerate their go-to-market speed by 20%, reducing the time from product development to market launch.
Businesses using SAP Business Network also report that the effects of speeding up and simplifying the selling processes were crucial to overall business success, showing a 36.8% increase in customer satisfaction and a 53.8% improvement in sales administration efficiency. The total annual revenue gain through these means added up to $2 million per organization.
Leveraging SAP Business Network as a supplier
As companies search for solutions that enable them to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, business networks have emerged as a powerful tool to meet performance goals, improve efficiency, and comply with regulatory requirements.
SAP Business Network takes this a step further by integrating with both traditional and emerging supply chain management applications. By enabling suppliers to grow their customer base and build stronger relationships through increased visibility and trust, SAP Business Network helps empower suppliers to operate more strategically and competitively in today’s digital economy.
The benefits highlighted in this research complement the buyer-side advantages explored in my previous article, underscoring the holistic value that SAP Business Network can bring to the entire supply chain ecosystem. As we continue to navigate the complexities of modern procurement and supply chain management, platforms like SAP Business Network will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business collaboration and efficiency.
Tony Harris is SVP and chief marketing and solutions officer of SAP Business Network.
