How SAP is Driving Procurement Efficiency

SAP Intelligent Spend and Business Network solutions enable organisations to ensure every spend decision fuels their business strategy by bringing simplicity and clarity to all types of spending.

The supply chain of users remains a critical focus for SAP. At its Sapphire 2024 event in Orlando, Florida, enhancements from SAP further strengthen supply chain resilience, while growing partnerships to improve supply chain collaboration.

Other innovations across the ISBN (intelligent, spend management and business networks) portfolio include intelligent AI-driven recommendations to make procurement more intuitive and analytics for external workforce management.

How SAP is improving supply chain resilience

The SAP Business Network portfolio of solutions is now even more integrated for the benefit of the supply chain, material traceability and freight collaboration, helping companies in making their supply chain even more resilient.

Improved integration between SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration and SAP Business Network Material Traceability allows suppliers to easily share product genealogy data, ensuring end-to-end traceability and compliance all the way from the raw materials to the products they create.

Improved integration between SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration and SAP Business Network Freight Collaboration automatically updates advanced shipping notices and creates inbound deliveries, letting buyers better manage carrier appointments and shipment tracking.

Making procurement more intuitive

SAP's new procurement option and GenAI feature in the buying 360 capability for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. SAP announces a new procurement option and generative AI feature in the buying 360 capability for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. This feature lets buyers bundle products and services into a single transaction, also known as spend bundling. With GenAI, users will be able to provide a description of their purchasing needs using natural language and the system will generate a recommended bundle of items and services ready for buying, saving users considerable time searching catalogues for a specific item.

These new features are planned to be available later in 2024.

“The Business AI innovations we’re announcing at Sapphire 2024 will redefine the way businesses run,” says SAP CEO, Christian Klein.

“Today’s AI announcements and partnerships build on our commitment to deliver revolutionary technology that drives real-world results, helping customers unleash the agility and ingenuity they need to succeed in today’s fast-moving business landscape.”

Improving asset collaboration

External contractors and operators in the supply chain can now efficiently collaborate on maintenance using the enhancements to the SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration solution.

These improvements give asset ecosystem partners shared transparency in the planning and execution of maintenance operations, thus removing the silos between and within organisations in the SAP Business Network.

This will allow businesses to collaborate on integrated and secure work orders across the entirety of the service chain and boost resilience in the supply chain. Maintenance and contingent workers will benefit from the integration between statements of work and service claims.

Maintenance and procurement processes are improved thanks to the visibility of maintenance activity across the entire lifecycle of procured services and spare parts.

Integration across the application portfolio

SAP’s new integrations will help customers achieve better business outcomes across the whole of the value chain.

These new capabilities include enhance source-to-pay, design-to-operate and recruit-to-retire business processes, as well as additional app integrations designed to increase productivity and cut processing times.

SAP Ariba Central Invoice Management now integrates with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, matching invoices against purchase orders and goods receipt documents. This leads to better process compliance, less out-of-scope spending, and greater automation in accounts payable processes.

SAP has integrated product, location, sales history, and customer master data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, making advanced demand planning and management processes more accurate.

Using the SAP Master Data Integration service, clients can now also automatically import workforce data from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central into the Concur Expense solution. All this will give customers an immediate and consistent view of their operations and data, enabling faster decision-making and innovation.

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