Even after two years of successive lockdowns and variants, COVID-19 continues to endanger supply chains, congest seaports, and strain labor markets. The ongoing uncertainty has reinforced the need for organizations to see beyond the next disruption by embracing digital transformation.
To get ahead of rapid shifts in the marketplace, businesses are turning to the cloud, where increasingly integrated digital networks extend visibility and ensure resilience across their operations and those of their interconnected buyers and suppliers.
Offering flexibility, speed, security, and cost-effectiveness, the cloud continues to deliver undeniable value. According to Gartner, 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy by 2025. Doing so allows them to turn their attention to the task of applying cloud-based technologies to run their business, rather than running the technologies themselves.
Growing margins and greater efficiencies are two of the benefits enterprises can enjoy through RISE with SAP, a comprehensive cloud offering that helps deliver a strategic approach to digital transformation. The package provides services and functionality to help businesses along their journey to becoming intelligent enterprises.
RISE with SAP enables companies to gain insights from across their operations and combine them with those from trading partners to help guide decisions. For example, consider your favorite online apparel retailer. While they may fulfill your order in-house, they will need to engage with an external logistics provider to deliver it.
This is why integrated business networks are so important. To become connected, intelligent enterprises, businesses need strong collaboration with trading partners and full visibility into supply chains to ensure agility and resilience.
SAP Business Network — a cloud-based, integrated network of networks spanning procurement, asset management, supply chain, and logistics — provides immediate access and 360-degree visibility into one’s trading partners. Through a single digital connection, the network can replace messy one-to-one integrations with a tidy many-to-many, inter-company process flow. In doing so, it lends transparency and up-to-the-minute information across all buyers and suppliers, shippers, carriers, operators, and manufacturers so they may identify risks, plan for potential disruption, and collaborate toward innovation. SAP Business Network helps make it possible to adjust operations as needed or pursue alternative sourcing in real time.
With these capabilities, the benefits can also be transferred to the customer, for example by providing visibility into their purchase from the time an order is placed to when the parcel arrives at the customer’s door. One of the many advantages of this level of transparency is that when the package is delayed, the retailer can alert the customer, ensuring the trusted relationship remains intact.
With the addition of the SAP Business Network Starter Pack as part of RISE with SAP, customers can experience a networked ERP to aid their transition to the cloud and drive business transformation.
This enables customers to connect with their suppliers and trading partners from source to settlement through the networks’ procurement capabilities; connects their equipment suppliers and services providers to help ensure maximum uptime of critical assets on the production line through the networks’ asset intelligence capabilities; and allows customers to work with logistics providers to obtain the best shipping rates and track and trace products and materials using the networks’ logistics capabilities.
That’s the value of SAP Business Network packaged as part of RISE with SAP: it enables organizations to future-proof their business, not only within their four walls but also beyond them, allowing customers to replace one-to-one connections and fragmented data-sharing with many-to-many collaborations and real-time data sharing.
This article was originally published on the global SAP News Center.