No company does business alone, and today’s leaders have a unique opportunity to manage their supply chains as strategic assets that can optimize and even expand their customer relationships.
That requires them to build efficient procurement, supply chain, and distribution processes while recognizing that serving customers effectively is the single biggest objective — the “why” — that should drive “how” those processes operate.
SAP Business Network is a powerful platform for linking core business processes between trading partners while ensuring visibility, efficiency, and compliance. SAP Business Network closes the break point between buyers and suppliers, contract manufacturers, service providers, and carriers by enabling digitized transaction exchange, information sharing, and trading partner discovery, while leveraging AI and configurable business rules.
Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans recently spoke with Valerie Blatt, global head for SAP Business Network customer success and go-to-market, to understand how customers use the SAP Business Network in supply chains and trading partnerships that are so critical to their ability to innovate and compete in today’s rapidly changing business environment.
The Customer-Centric Supply Chain
Blatt provided context by explaining the benefits of a robust supply chain in optimizing customer relationships. “It’s about delivering that great customer experience, ensuring that the customers get their goods and services and that, ultimately, they’re satisfied in buying again,” she said.
This priority must be clearly established and understood when operating and fine-tuning the supply chain. “Supply chain executives should think the ‘why’ is actually their customer, not the operation,” Blatt explained. Efficient processes — delivering goods and services that meet customers’ needs — are the “how” behind great customer experiences.
Still, optimized customer experiences can’t come at the expense of core business objectives. “We need to think about how we meet the business imperatives around efficiency and cost management and be conscious of how we deliver a great customer experience.”
Asked about challenges that customers face when balancing operational efficiency in the supply chain with customer satisfaction, Blatt cited visibility, referencing experiences during and after Covid, when customers frequently didn’t know when orders would arrive, where they were coming from, or what external factors such as delays at ports were causing disruptions. Such a lack of visibility makes it more difficult to manage risk, but the challenges shouldn’t deter an organization in its efforts to deliver great customer experience. “Even in customer-centric supply chains, you don’t have to trade one off for the other,” she said.
Additionally, compliance and meeting regulatory requirements are increasingly recognized as mission-critical supply chain priorities. “It’s not only operating as efficiently as you can from just being internally efficient, but it’s understanding what’s going on in the world from a regulation standpoint as well,” Blatt said.
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Helping Businesses Perform Better
As companies strive to establish customer experience as their supply-chain “why,” some are not fully embracing the technology or cultural changes that will yield optimal customer experiences.
“While most companies have done a pretty good job at deploying technologies and automating their core processes, a lot of companies are actually, in my opinion, not bold enough when it comes to really driving the changes that they need to drive,” Blatt commented.
More specifically, Blatt believes that many companies are failing to implement transformative technologies that will benefit customers because they don’t see such technologies as a competitive advantage. “They’re still thinking of themselves as an operator,” she said.
To illustrate the point that some companies aren’t changing fast enough, Blatt recounted a recent event in Europe where she asked a group of senior executives how many of their companies still send orders via fax. With one exception, all of the 50 or so in attendance still do so.
So how does SAP Business Network help companies build modern, efficient supply chains for standout customer experiences?
The network modernizes how companies connect and collaborate across procurement and supply chain processes: integrating with back-end systems on both sides of a trading partner relationship, enabling organizations to share information to gain all-important visibility, operate more efficiently, and comply with internal policies and external regulations.
Increased visibility, efficiency, and compliance, in turn, drive continuous improvement that is making customer-centric supply chains a reality.
In fact, a study that SAP conducted with IDC* found that SAP Business Network customers had a remarkable 404% three-year return on their investment. Customers also reported 30% faster go-to-market speed, and 27% faster product/order delivery time when using SAP Business Network.
Additional customer benefits that have been quantified through SAP Performance Benchmarking:
- 40% to 60% reduction in expedited logistics operating costs for improved visibility
- 40% to 60% reduction in operating costs for processing invoices for greater efficiency
- 83% of total invoices processed without exceptions for enhanced compliance
What started out as a procurement network roughly 20 years ago now supports over $6 trillion worth of transaction volume on a rolling 12-month basis, thanks in large part to the types of efficiencies detailed above.
As these data points indicate, SAP Business Network provides businesses with a range of opportunities to create processes that deliver exceptional supply chain performance and customer experiences.
But companies also need to embrace the changes required in terms of technology, processes, and organizational considerations.
“What I would say to all my supply chain friends, whether you’re in planning, whether you’re in operations, whether you’re in logistics, whether you’re in procurement be bold,” Blatt said. “Your competitors, I think, are going to be bold, and we are going to see this more and more, that the companies that can be super-efficient and customer-centric at the same time…are the customers that are going to win.”
Be efficient. Be customer-centric. Be bold. That’s a solid prescription for supply chain success in 2025.
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* IDC Business Value Snapshot, sponsored by SAP, “Business Value of SAP Business Network – Buy Side,” IDC #US52679524, 2024.
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