Tony Harris, SAP SVP: Helping Supply Chain Resilience
With big sale events marked in people’s calendars, supply chains can find themselves under increased pressure - no more so than when two of the largest e-commerce platforms launch sales events in consecutive weeks.
With TikTok’s “Deals For You Days,” directly followed by Amazon Prime Day on July 16 and 17. These back-to-back events usually stretch the retail supply chain as consumers rush to take advantage of the deals.
Tony Harris, SVP & Head of Marketing & Solutions, SAP Business Network, leads product marketing teams that form a bridge between SAP solutions and its customers.
Since joining SAP in 2006, he has focused on creating product packaging, messaging and GTM strategies that meet customers where they are in addition to identifying market trends, customer challenges and insights from the field teams to create an outside-in view of the market that helps to drive innovation within SAP Business Network.
He sat down with Procurement Magazine to discuss how supply chains can make it through the challenge moments like this present.
How can retailers mitigate supply challenges?
Supply chains were heavily shaped by geopolitical tensions, climate impacts, economic uncertainties and more in the past year. These challenges pushed supply chain leaders to take a critical eye to their supply chains to consider yet more unprecedented scenarios to de-risk their supply chains in addition to cost.
As the list of supply chain challenges and disruptions evolves and supply chains remain in a “permanent crisis,” technology is no longer optional.
Businesses must use integrated technologies to keep track of their suppliers and their suppliers’ suppliers. They need a sophisticated solution that not only connects supply chain and logistics data across an organisation but also organises a global network of suppliers, including logistics providers and more, in one platform to enable efficient collaboration.
This visibility gives leaders a heads-up on potential disruptions, allows them to quickly identify a backup plan and provides other critical information like environmental impact.
By tapping into the power of relevant, responsible and reliable data, supply chain leaders can build contingencies, so they have the real-time information needed to make informed decisions and pivot quickly before new disruptions emerge.
Moreover, artificial intelligence – particularly generative AI – plays an increasingly pivotal role in ensuring supply chain risk resilience by enhancing organisations’ ability to plan for disruptions before they occur, respond quickly and maintain communication with stakeholders throughout that process.
With the right proactive measures, supply chain leaders will be better equipped to predict disruption and react in the face of new and evolving challenges.
Why is collaboration so vital in today’s procurement landscape?
No business does business alone. No matter the industry or what a business produces, it cannot do so without tight collaboration with a whole range of other companies or trading partners.
From suppliers of raw materials to contract manufacturers, packaging companies, logistics carriers, service providers and many more, supply chain visibility at all tiers is essential for every trading partner to succeed.
In procurement, collaboration between buyers, suppliers and other partners improves purchase order management, invoice processing and much more.
As businesses grapple with increased challenges as a result of supply chain volatility, disruptions and economic uncertainties, collaboration is vital in helping increase transparency, improve decision-making, enhance supplier relationships and streamline procurement processes, which also contributes to overall business efficiency and savings, for both parties.
However, this level of collaboration can no longer be managed by traditional methods of collaboration. Instead, businesses need to reinvent how they collaborate with suppliers.
For next-level supplier collaboration, businesses need to embrace digitised collaboration methods, which promote resilience and adaptability in the face of future market changes.
This approach not only empowers suppliers to proactively respond to unexpected shifts in their environment but will enable greater supply chain effectiveness.
How can automation enhance the scale and help retailers during times of increased demand?
The consumer products landscape is increasingly complex.
Demand for products tailored to consumers’ specific wants and needs has led to an explosion in the number of product ranges that businesses must develop, manufacture and distribute to a proliferation of new customer microsegments.
A most recent example includes the largest e-commerce platforms launching sales events in consecutive weeks: TikTok’s “Deals for You Days,” which started on July 9, directly followed by Amazon Prime Day on July 16 and 17. These back-to-back events will undoubtedly stretch the retail supply chain as consumers rush to take advantage of the deals.
For retailers, it can be futile to plan for a 100% increase in sales if they haven’t shared that forecast demand with their suppliers and their supplier’s suppliers because they might not have the required stock levels to meet that demand.
That’s where solutions like SAP Business Network come into play, enabling customer demand to be shared with their suppliers and for suppliers to quickly and easily confirm their ability to meet that demand.
By automating procurement transactions with trading partners and boasting capabilities such as vendor managed inventory make this even easier. Where buyers cannot do so, SAP Business Networks can also provide a directory of millions of suppliers where buyers can search for new sources of supply.
Beyond sharing the demand details, SAP Business Networks also equips businesses with improved transactional collaboration processes, giving buyers and suppliers a more effective way to collaborate on transactions, strengthen relationships and discover new business opportunities.
Buyers can also automate their buying and invoicing transactions while controlling spending, finding new sources of savings and increasing compliance and accuracy.
At the same time, suppliers can help buyers achieve their procurement automation goals, simplify procurement and invoicing transactions and improve cash flow.
What is the best approach for improved collaboration?
The ongoing disruptions caused by the pandemic and continuing geopolitical tensions have been a major test of the world’s supply chains.
These disruptions have forced many industry players to reconsider their business strategies, as well as their relationship with buyers, to cope more effectively with the unexpected.
To address this, organisations – in collaboration with their technology partners – are seeking to adopt diversified networks and leverage digitalisation to become more resilient and agile.
A business network connects people, processes and systems across multiple enterprises, digitalising transactions and creating transparent, resilient and sustainable supply chains.
A network foster's partner collaboration across procurement, supply chain, people, logistics, finance and asset management, enabling data exchange and intelligent decision making.
This approach not only helps expand buyer networks but also improves productivity and efficiency throughout supply chain operations.
Beyond this, business networks offer complete visibility into all activities and agility to react quickly to find and secure alternative sources of supply.
Leveraging business networks can also help reduce silos between and within organisations, resulting in significant time and cost savings with fewer manual steps in processing work orders.
What are the biggest challenges facing supply chains and how can SAP help to ease those burdens?
In the past few years, we’ve seen how supply chain disruption can come at us from any direction – natural disasters, political disputes, labour actions, a pandemic. No matter the origin, an organisation’s ability to react decisively depends on two things: visibility and agility.
Companies that have taken steps to transform supply chain operations from traditional, linear supply models to more resilient and collaborative supply chain networks have distinct advantages.
First, they can see into their supply chains to anticipate and act on disruptions before they paralyse operations; and second, they have the agility to locate and engage with alternate suppliers – such as providers of materials and finished goods, logistics services, or even contingent labour.
Collaborative supply chain networks open the doors for suppliers and their customers to do this successfully.
Unfortunately, many systems used today are incapable of extending internal processes and transactions beyond their own “four walls.”
This causes a strain in the buyer and supplier relationship which is exacerbated by ineffective technologies being used to bridge the gap.
Traditional communication methods such as e-mail, paper, phone and single-use portals were never designed to manage transactional collaboration between buyer and supplier systems at scale. Operating on a 1:1 basis, these traditional methods provide very little visibility and have no ability to ensure compliance.
At SAP, we help our customers transform fragmented business networks through tight collaboration with trading partners to address current supply challenges and help business move faster than ever before.
For example, our SAP Business Network for Supply Chain solution enables trading partners and their customers to collaborate for transparency into a multi tier supply chain to help assure supply and on-time delivery, respond to disruption and drive sustainability and product quality.
Buyers can share critical information with trading partners for improved visibility into inventory, capacity and supply; develop resiliency and respond to risk through tight collaboration with trading partners; and drive sustainability initiatives and safeguard brand reputation.
What does the future of the retail supply chain look like as it aims to eliminate these challenges?
As market conditions and omnichannel engagements change, retailers must ensure the right number of products are at the correct locations on time, perform accurate forecasting and receive intelligent recommendations to maximise business performance.
Building a resilient supply chain is a must for retailers and that requires using technology like automation and AI.
Automating essential functions like supplier relationship management frees employees to focus on preparing for periods of increased demand and develop strategic sourcing plans. SAP’s solutions, from demand planning to order management, enable retailers to align supply with customer demand and set the stage for a successful end-to-end process that delivers on their customer promise.
This also improves key business metrics and increases service levels, profitability, sustainability and margin.
Furthermore, AI-driven demand forecasting and predictive analytics play a crucial role in maintaining optimal inventory levels by accurately predicting demand patterns, leading to higher customer satisfaction as products are available when needed and it also drives profitability by reducing excess inventory costs.
Overall, the integration of automation and AI will streamline operations, enhance efficiency, enable proactive problem-solving and allow employees to focus on strategic initiatives that drive long-term growth and resilience, ultimately helping organisations keep pace with industry disruptions while enhancing customer satisfaction.
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