For more from Corning, go inside Corning's BTP Center for Enablement (C4E), with IT Solutions Architect Tom Gee, who recently discussed the company's approach to implementing SAP Business Technology Platform at ASUG Tech Connect.
At Corning Incorporated, a material sciences, optical physics, and glass company, digital transformation began not with a new ERP system but with a new way of working. For a company with nearly 175 years of supply chain experience, the decision to modernize required both ambition and pragmatism.
“Our supply chain started when the bulbs were invented,” noted Aravind Bala, IT Manager and Global Supply Chain Service Owner at Corning, during a recent session at the 2025 edition of SAP Connect, an inaugural conference held in Las Vegas. “We were the first mass manufacturers when Edison invented the bulb with filaments and glass.”
Today, Corning operates across five global Market Access Platforms—Optical Communications, Display Technologies, Mobile Consumer Electronics, Automotive, and Life Sciences—and manufactures products that form the backbone of modern communications and clean technology. That scale also brought complexity; decades of acquisitions and regional variations resulted in a fragmented technology landscape that made it difficult for internal stakeholders to gain a unified view of supply and demand.
By 2020, Corning’s supply chain teams recognized that modernization would have to address more than just core systems. The goal was to consolidate 29 ERP systems into a single digital core with SAP S/4HANA. Unifying data alone could not solve the problem. Corning also had to bring its vast network of suppliers and manufacturing partners into the fold.
The team decided to act rather than wait for the eventual SAP S/4HANA migration, turning to SAP Supply Chain Collaboration (SAP SCC), a cloud-based platform in SAP Business Network that lets buyers and suppliers share forecasts, purchase orders, and confirmations within one connected environment.
The decision reflected a broader belief: resilience depends on connectivity, not just consolidation. As Bala noted, “the formula of great resilient supply chains is agility and visibility.”
Orchestration First
The diversity of Corning’s operations meant that even routine supply processes varied widely across its businesses. Each Market Access Platform had its own structure and supplier base. “You cannot have one straightforward standard process to standardize and improve,” he remarked. “Each has its own, discrete, continuous manufacturing, constraint-based, demand-based, supply-based challenges.”
Moving everything at once to a new ERP system would have required extensive coordination and carried significant risk. Leaders instead looked for a way to simplify supplier engagement while laying the groundwork for a clean core.
Corning adopted SAP’s SCOR model, focusing on the ‘Collaborate’ pillar. “We are so trained to think that we have to collaborate within our teams, but the fact is, our extended teams are also our extended trading partners,” said Bala.
The aim was to build an orchestrated supplier network that could run on top of SAP ECC and transition smoothly to S/4HANA later — an approach that turned out to be both lower-risk and faster to deliver results. During implementation, “the lift for SCC is much smaller than for an S/4HANA transformation,” Bala explained. The company could gain early visibility and process improvements while preparing its foundation for the eventual S/4HANA migration.
Starting small proved to be an important principle. The team deliberately framed SCC as an “edge transformation” that could mature independently of the ERP program. “A lot of companies right now are thinking that S/4 will solve a lot of their problems, but supply chains are dynamic enough to challenge that thought. S/4 alone will not solve that problem,” said Bala. “The value that you gain out of this will outplay that.”
The approach also fits Corning’s culture of measured experimentation: pilot quickly, validate results, then scale. “It’s always good to start small,” explained Bala. “These are cloud products. Increasing the footprint is easy.”
How the Pilot Became a Playbook
Corning began its initiative in 2022 with a focused pilot linking ECC to SCC through the SAP Cloud Integration Gateway and Cloud Connector. When the pilot kicked off, they set an achievable scope: modernize supplier engagement but leave the core systems untouched. Most of the activity ran in the cloud, with ECC staying in place to keep day-to-day operations steady.
From a technical angle, the setup was modest, but in practice, the results were felt almost immediately. Suppliers could receive purchase orders, send confirmations, and check forecasts in a single portal instead of juggling emails and EDI messages.
The first rollout covered two manufacturing plants in North America and centered on high-volume transactions that carried the most friction. Purchase Order Collaboration and Forecast Collaboration were selected as the opening use cases, representing several active document types. Early testing revealed how much time was lost to back-and-forth communication about delivery dates and material availability. With SCC in place, those updates moved in real time, closing communication gaps that had long slowed the process.
With the pilot underway, Corning expanded in deliberate waves using a formal “supplier flight plan.” Each wave listed which suppliers would join, how they would be trained, and what results would mark success. Within a few months, over one hundred suppliers were operating on the network. The success gave Corning a framework it could repeat across its Market Access Platforms.
Onboarding suppliers became a major effort in of itself. Corning teams including business, supplier enablement, SAP and IT teams worked side by side with their partners, logging in, testing transactions, and learning the dashboards together. The live demonstrations made it immediately clear how much faster the process could be compared to the old way of doing things. Global Supply Management and OCM teams made sure no one was left out of the loop, relying on internal newsletters, training, and supplier meetings to sustain momentum.
Some of the simplest adjustments ended up yielding the biggest payoff. One involved adding a barcode label to inbound materials so that receiving data could be scanned instead of typed in by hand. “It sounds small, but if you talk to a warehouse professional, you’re improving so much of their day-to-day life, right from receiving efficiencies,” he said. The new label cut down on matching exceptions and sped up goods receipt, giving staff more time for analysis and problem-solving rather than data correction.
Even with the progress made, some hurdles were inevitable. Corning’s IT landscape includes multiple sandboxes and quality environments, and routine system refreshes occasionally disrupted existing integrations — and restoring those took time. Bala emphasized that “it’s not a one-and-done connection. You must redo it every time you change data within the system.”
Together, these efforts gave Corning a clear picture of what digital collaboration could achieve even before the company moved to S/4HANA. The results were immediate: faster confirmations, fewer disputes, and closer supplier relationships.
The Results and What’s Next
The initial phase delivered clear improvements: Suppliers responded more quickly; Processing times for purchase orders and documents dropped; Manual corrections decreased; Goods-receipt accuracy and alignment with supplier confirmations increased. The barcode initiative virtually eliminated entry errors during reconciliation, giving both Corning staff and suppliers more time for higher-value work.
This shared visibility built trust and encouraged a more cooperative way of working across the network. “Through that process, you end up improving your relationship with your suppliers,” said Bala. With both sides looking at the same data in real time, small misunderstandings disappeared, and day-to-day communication became easier.
The project also strengthened Corning’s confidence in its broader digital roadmap. By proving that real business value could be achieved on SCC, the team established a model for other divisions to emulate and a bridge to its future S/4HANA environment. The SCC deployment, in effect, became a pilot for the company’s clean-core philosophy by demonstrating how to achieve modernization outcomes without disrupting core stability.
Recognition followed not long after. SAP honored Corning with its Supply Chain Orchestration Award at this year’s SAP Connect. The acknowledgment reflected Corning’s habit of thinking holistically, showing that real transformation can come from focused, practical steps rather than sweeping system changes.
Corning is now expanding its SCC footprint to additional product lines and suppliers while formalizing its KPIs. The company is leveraging embedded analytics within SAP Business Network to track activity levels, exception trends, and performance benchmarks. Long-term plans include integrating SCC data with S/4HANA and exploring capabilities such as Source-to-Contract.
Reflecting on the path ahead, Bala noted, “We did the hard part of it. Now I think the easy part is waiting for us with the S/4 integration. Hopefully, we do that well.”