Few announce­ments at this year’s SAP Spend Con­nect Live con­fer­ence in Las Vegas drove as much excite­ment among atten­dees as those rel­e­vant to SAP Busi­ness Network. 

Since its launch in 2021, SAP Busi­ness Net­work has aimed to address the need for orga­ni­za­tions to col­lab­o­rate with their most crit­i­cal trad­ing part­ners and see into their sup­ply chains. SAP Busi­ness Net­work inte­grat­ed SAP’s lead­ing busi­ness net­works — includ­ing SAP Ari­ba Net­work — to cre­ate a B2B pro­cure­ment and sup­ply chain col­lab­o­ra­tion hub that pro­vides its users with unprece­dent­ed sup­ply chain vis­i­bil­i­ty. It auto­mates the pro­cure­ment process for buy­ers and helps sup­pli­ers strength­en their rela­tion­ships and unlock new busi­ness opportunities. 

With mil­lions of com­pa­nies con­duct­ing over $6 tril­lion in com­merce annu­al­ly on the plat­form, com­pared to about $4 tril­lion annu­al­ly in 2020, SAP Busi­ness Net­work is already grow­ing rapid­ly as a dig­i­tal mar­ket­place of choice for mil­lions of buy­ers and sup­pli­ers world­wide. At SAP Spend Con­nect Live, the com­pa­ny announced anoth­er leap for­ward for the net­work, putting it in a posi­tion to expand even further. 

In the first quar­ter of 2025, a ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion for sup­pli­ers on SAP Busi­ness Net­work will become avail­able. This sub­scrip­tion will allow sup­pli­ers to improve their vis­i­bil­i­ty on the net­work, attract new buy­ers, and grow their busi­ness­es. Accord­ing to SAP, through the ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion, sup­pli­ers will receive rec­om­men­da­tions to improve dis­cov­er­abil­i­ty, explore advanced search results, ver­i­fy their sup­pli­er pro­files, and make use of net­work cat­a­log APIs. 

Joule, the SAP gen­er­a­tive AI copi­lot, will also be inte­grat­ed to help auto­mate logis­tics and asset man­age­ment process­es with­in SAP Busi­ness Net­work. Through its nat­ur­al lan­guage inter­face, users can address and nav­i­gate sta­tus requests and queries, invoice dis­putes, work orders, freight orders, and more. Joule’s abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy errors while ana­lyz­ing, cat­e­go­riz­ing, and pro­vid­ing insights into invoice rejec­tions will reduce the cost of resolv­ing exceptions. 

With SAP Busi­ness Net­work gain­ing more gen­er­a­tive AI capa­bil­i­ties, sup­pli­ers can also speed up the high­ly man­u­al work of fill­ing out RFPs and relat­ed spend paper­work, load­ing all their avail­able offer­ings into the net­work cat­a­log, and opti­miz­ing prod­uct descrip­tions and summaries. 

Sup­pli­ers can gain insights into how they appear in search­es, update key­words to reflect trend­ing top­ics, eval­u­ate their geo­graph­i­cal reach, apply sus­tain­abil­i­ty rat­ings via Eco­Vadis, and track their over­all vis­i­bil­i­ty in the plat­form. Mean­while, buy­ers can view sup­pli­er pro­files and fil­ter by var­i­ous cri­te­ria, includ­ing how active sup­pli­ers are on SAP Busi­ness Net­work, to bring up those best matched to their needs. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, SAP Busi­ness Net­work will allow busi­ness­es to cap­ture car­bon emis­sions and trace their ship­ments across the entire sup­ply chain, from the point of ori­gin to the point of deliv­ery. Through SAP’s part­ner­ship with Shippeo, which pro­vides real-time trans­porta­tion vis­i­bil­i­ty, the car­bon asso­ci­at­ed with ship­ments can also be tracked. 

To dis­cuss the recent announce­ments, ASUG sat down with Tony Har­ris, SVP & Head of Mar­ket­ing & Solu­tions for SAP Busi­ness Net­work, who dis­cussed the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties inform­ing the glob­al sup­ply chain and why this col­lab­o­ra­tion net­work rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tion for SAP. 

This inter­view has been edit­ed and con­densed.

Across the past cou­ple of years, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties have been top-of-mind for SAP cus­tomers in the glob­al sup­ply chain space, and how does the SAP Busi­ness Net­work address them? 

We’re still see­ing the post-pan­dem­ic effect of con­stant dis­rup­tion. For the most part, our cus­tomers are still very much focused on achiev­ing bet­ter sup­ply chain vis­i­bil­i­ty, so they can become more resilient in their sup­ply chain oper­a­tions and meet their cus­tomers’ needs: to get the right prod­uct at the right price in the right place at the right time. Any­thing that we can do to help cus­tomers along that par­tic­u­lar jour­ney is what we are focused on, and that’s what we’re see­ing cus­tomers want from us. 

One of the beau­ties of SAP Busi­ness Net­work is these are exact­ly the kind of sce­nar­ios that the net­work is built to sup­port. If you think about the pur­pose of the net­work, we essen­tial­ly mod­ern­ize how pro­cure­ment and sup­ply chain process­es are con­nect­ed across com­pa­nies, effec­tive­ly elim­i­nat­ing the break­point between buy­er and sup­pli­er sys­tems that exist today. 

In the process of doing that, we enable our cus­tomers to achieve bet­ter sup­ply chain vis­i­bil­i­ty, dri­ve bet­ter oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy with­in their busi­ness, and in many dif­fer­ent ways help them achieve full com­pli­ance, whether that’s inter­nal com­pli­ance or reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance. Effi­cien­cy, vis­i­bil­i­ty, and com­pli­ance are the three tenets, if you will, of what the net­work sets out to achieve. I’m hap­py to say we’re deliv­er­ing on all fronts, espe­cial­ly giv­en the fact that we con­nect to so many SAP appli­ca­tions in the sup­ply chain area. 

SAP Busi­ness Net­work also sup­ports trans­ac­tion col­lab­o­ra­tion. If the buy­er-side sys­tem doesn’t have a good way of enabling an exter­nal par­ty to be involved in a process or trans­ac­tion, it’s because there’s no user inter­face for them to log into. It could be an ERP sys­tem, which does not sup­port exter­nal par­ties com­ing in; it’s designed for process­es with­in the four walls of the for­mal busi­ness. The net­work is in the mid­dle, facil­i­tat­ing that con­nec­tion between buy­er and sup­pli­er. We extend SAP Trans­porta­tion Man­age­ment with our logis­tics capa­bil­i­ties for freight; glob­al track and trace capa­bil­i­ties; logis­tics for dock appoint­ment sched­ul­ing; sup­ply chain plan­ning; and SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning inte­gra­tion. How do you get your demand fore­cast to the sup­pli­er? You do it via the net­work. The supplier’s user inter­face shows — row-by-row, col­umn-by-col­umn — the demand that you’re ask­ing of them. They can con­firm, or oth­er­wise assess, their abil­i­ty to meet that demand. 

Through­out our sup­ply-chain appli­ca­tions, we also sup­port asset man­age­ment, with work order col­lab­o­ra­tion. The engi­neer receives the work order via the net­work, and then they can con­firm what they’ve done and how many hours they spent per­form­ing the work, and that infor­ma­tion goes back into the ERP sys­tem. SAP Busi­ness Net­work has proven extreme­ly pop­u­lar with our sup­ply chain cus­tomers because it helps solve that chal­lenge of col­lab­o­ra­tion with exter­nal par­ties. With­out the net­work, it tends to be done via spread­sheets, email, phone calls, and even snail mail in some cases. 

To your point, his­tor­i­cal­ly frag­ment­ed and high­ly man­u­al process­es lim­it the abil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als in net­works, in areas such as freight, to com­mu­ni­cate and col­lab­o­rate. Even a glob­al sup­ply chain inevitably breaks down to an indi­vid­ual lev­el, which makes indi­vid­ual adop­tion of solu­tions and a col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of the need for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion both essen­tial. What strate­gies is SAP employ­ing, such as improv­ing inte­gra­tion between SAP and non-SAP sys­tems, to encour­age buy­ers and sup­pli­ers to go through SAP Busi­ness Network? 

On the truck­ing side of the busi­ness, there are mil­lions of one-off, mom-and-pop shops that have one or two trucks around the world. For us to try to work with all of them direct­ly wasn’t the right route. Instead, we facil­i­tate direct inte­gra­tion with the biggest car­ri­ers, which is their pref­er­ence, and work with some of the largest logis­tics ser­vice providers (LSPs) who con­nect to these small­er car­ri­ers themselves. 

The small­er car­ri­ers tend to go through the LSPs, who encour­age the small­er car­ri­ers to use the SAP Busi­ness Net­work por­tal to pick up an order. We’ve already achieved this with a lot of the larg­er car­ri­ers, and for the major­i­ty of the cus­tomers, 80% of their car­ri­er needs are served by the biggest carriers. 

What’s also great about this aspect of the net­work is that we’re tap­ping into real-time trans­porta­tion infor­ma­tion, data on the where­abouts in the world of a con­tain­er. That’s pre­vi­ous­ly unheard of. The extent of vis­i­bil­i­ty has explod­ed over the last few years. Cus­tomers today say, ​“I don’t know how we ever lived with­out this.” As an exam­ple, a con­tain­er of goods com­ing from Chi­na to Los Ange­les is expect­ed to be a six-week jour­ney; but, because there are storms or there was dam­age to a ship so it had to dock else­where for repairs, you can see it’ll take an extra three weeks. With SAP Busi­ness Net­work, you can see the knock-on effects, replan the man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es you were going to use those com­po­nents for, and inform cus­tomers so they’re aware of the delays. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can see if you have those goods in anoth­er con­tain­er else­where that you can fly into your loca­tion to min­i­mize dis­rup­tion to the man­u­fac­tur­ing plan, and the delayed con­tain­er can ulti­mate­ly be used to replen­ish the stock. SAP Busi­ness Net­work gives you more vis­i­bil­i­ty and enables bet­ter plan­ning when dis­rup­tions occur. 

That improved vis­i­bil­i­ty and strate­gic plan­ning capa­bility also ben­e­fit busi­ness­es from a sus­tain­abil­i­ty per­spec­tive, help­ing them cut down on scope-three emissions. 

With a num­ber of our solu­tions, we’ve start­ed to build out sus­tain­abil­i­ty capa­bil­i­ties via car­bon cre­den­tials. For exam­ple, sup­pli­er pro­files on SAP Busi­ness Net­work can include a company’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty cer­ti­fi­ca­tions. Buy­ers can see sup­pli­ers’ Eco­Vadis rat­ings, which is help­ful to under­stand if a sup­pli­er meets sus­tain­abil­i­ty cri­te­ria. Sup­pli­ers also can load their entire prod­uct cat­a­log into the net­work cat­a­log, so buy­ers can assess which sup­pli­ers to short­list direct­ly through the network. 

Cus­tomers expect end prod­ucts to be deliv­ered with as small a car­bon foot­print as pos­si­ble, so they want access to that data in a sup­pli­er pro­file. For more detailed cal­cu­la­tions of car­bon, SAP Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Data Exchange allows buy­ers to send requests to sup­pli­ers for a car­bon break­down of the prod­ucts or the bill of mate­ri­als they want to purchase. 

Accord­ing to an indus­try-stan­dard tem­plate, there are about 70 fields in the cal­cu­la­tion of car­bon. Sup­pli­ers can send their cal­cu­la­tions to their sup­pli­ers and ask for car­bon data to be cap­tured there as well. This helps to build a high­ly accu­rate cal­cu­la­tion of what the car­bon fig­ure is for a giv­en prod­uct or sub-assem­bly, and that data can be shared with the SAP Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Foot­print Man­ag­er solu­tion and SAP Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Con­trol Tower. 

We’re going right down to the source as far as we can, let­ting all that data roll up to these con­trol-tow­er solu­tions SAP offers, so a com­pa­ny can see over­all what impacts they are hav­ing on the plan­et. Anoth­er exam­ple: with Shippeo, an SAP part­ner that brings real-time trans­porta­tion vis­i­bil­i­ty, you can cal­cu­late the car­bon foot­print of a ship­ment, based on whether a con­tain­er is full or not, what the route is, and so on. So, not only can you obtain the car­bon data relat­ed to the goods with­in a con­tain­er but also the jour­ney from ori­gin to destination. 

And just think about where we can take this. We’re not there yet, but with the data avail­able to us now, tak­ing advan­tage of all this new AI capa­bil­i­ty that our prod­uct engi­neer­ing teams are devel­op­ing, you could have the sys­tem tell you what you should buy — this prod­uct, from this sup­pli­er, in this coun­try, using this freight method — to cut your car­bon impact in half while reduc­ing trans­porta­tion time. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are exciting! 

Anoth­er core achieve­ment of the SAP Busi­ness Net­work is enabling buy­ers to oper­ate with ver­i­fi­able data around sup­pli­er per­for­mance. Please dis­cuss this aspect, espe­cial­ly in light of the ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion announced at SAP Spend Con­nect Live this year. 

With the ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion that we announced, the sup­pli­er will have a ver­i­fied pro­file, and the buy­er will also see the num­ber of rela­tion­ships that sup­pli­er has. We’re explor­ing what oth­er data ele­ments we’re allowed to share whilst adher­ing to data pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tions. But from a buy­er per­spec­tive, it would give the buy­er so much more assur­ance when they’re con­sid­er­ing a new sup­pli­er to see: 

• Pro­file verification
• Eco­Vadis rat­ing, so they know oth­er humans have engaged with that com­pa­ny to assess them.
• The num­ber of trans­act­ing rela­tion­ships the sup­pli­er has on the net­work already, which means they’re receiv­ing or send­ing goods and invoic­es with oth­er com­pa­nies, giv­ing the buy­er reas­sur­ance that this is a real supplier.

On the sup­pli­er side, the more busi­ness they can gen­er­ate through the net­work, the more they can start tap­ping into pre­ferred finance rates. We have sup­pli­er financ­ing capa­bil­i­ties on the net­work via our Tau­lia solu­tions. Tau­lia offers sup­pli­er financ­ing, sup­ply chain financ­ing, and dis­count man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties. As an exam­ple, a sup­pli­er could request their out­stand­ing receiv­ables be financed through Taulia. 

A sup­pli­er might say, ​“I’ve got $200,000 worth of invoic­es. They’re due to be paid in 30 days’ time; I’m hap­py to take a 2% cut to get the mon­ey tomor­row.” The more his­to­ry that is avail­able on that sup­pli­er, on the net­work, the more assured the lender is, the more trust­wor­thy the trans­ac­tion is. We’ve had feed­back from very small sup­pli­ers that they love this capa­bil­i­ty because when you’re a small com­pa­ny, cash flow is the lifeblood of your busi­ness. You could be doing a great job of man­u­fac­tur­ing your prod­ucts, or deliv­er­ing what­ev­er ser­vice you pro­vide, but you can be out of busi­ness very quick­ly if a cus­tomer decides to pay you two months late. The fact that they can tap into this finance capa­bil­i­ty very eas­i­ly, just giv­ing up a few basis points, is anoth­er great ben­e­fit to the supplier. 

As you can see, we’re con­stant­ly look­ing to see how we can bal­ance the val­ue propo­si­tion on the busi­ness net­work between the buy­er and the sup­pli­er. This start­ed a long time ago, on the Ari­ba Net­work, when the val­ue propo­si­tion was much more favor­able for buy­ers; it was more pro­cure­ment-cen­tric and all indi­rect. It was all about the buy­er. Over time, we’ve rebal­anced that val­ue propo­si­tion. That’s what the ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion is all about: giv­ing pow­er­ful capa­bil­i­ties to suppliers. 

With the addi­tion of this ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion, SAP Busi­ness Net­work — as a glob­al B2B net­work — sig­ni­fies a real shift from SAP, in terms of the types of in-appli­ca­tion offer­ings it deliv­ers to cus­tomers. It’s also a new go-to-mar­ket mod­el for SAP. Tell me about lay­ing the ground­work for that. 

A few years back, my team was look­ing at how to deliv­er more val­ue for sup­pli­ers. Ulti­mate­ly, we want­ed input from com­pa­nies’ sales and mar­ket­ing teams. The ques­tion was how we could reach them and con­vince them of the val­ue of join­ing a net­work where they aren’t cur­rent­ly doing business. 

Engag­ing with our sup­pli­er advi­so­ry board mem­bers, we start­ed ask­ing, ​“If there was any­thing you would want from the net­work, what kind of capa­bil­i­ties would you be look­ing for?” 

Togeth­er with that analy­sis, we also ran a com­pre­hen­sive research study through a third-par­ty firm, and we got fan­tas­tic feed­back on what sup­pli­ers would want from a B2B com­merce plat­form: ​“We want to have a ver­i­fied pro­file so any­one look­ing at us knows we are the real deal. We’d love to tap into data and ana­lyt­ics to under­stand what mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties there might be on this plat­form for us. For exam­ple, which indus­tries, which part of the world, and which size of com­pa­ny is buy­ing these cat­e­gories of goods? And we want to receive leads. We want to be matched to buy­er post­ings that are rel­e­vant to where we are in the world, to the goods and ser­vices that we offer.” 

We began to mod­el out what that could look like, what capa­bil­i­ties would be best to build into the mar­ket, how we could roll that out to sup­pli­ers, what price point was appro­pri­ate to charge for that set of capa­bil­i­ties, and how we could even reach those sup­pli­ers to offer this solu­tion to them. The sup­pli­er side is not like the buy­er side of our busi­ness, where you have a glob­al sales team engag­ing with prospects and cus­tomers to posi­tion our solu­tions. We need­ed a low-price-point solu­tion for our end-cus­tomers in the sup­pli­er space and the abil­i­ty for them to self-serve through a pure dig­i­tal click-to-buy approach. 

We’ve imple­ment­ed new mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy that enables us to direct­ly engage with a sup­pli­er whilst they’re using our por­tal to assist them with com­mon tasks such as com­plet­ing their pro­file. We can also pro­vide offers such as our new ​“pro­mote” sub­scrip­tion, and they can sub­scribe direct­ly with­in the sys­tem and start to ben­e­fit from the new capa­bil­i­ties straight away.