Businesses can no longer focus on only digitalizing their internal processes. Achieving true agility and resiliency in today鈥檚 networked economy requires a network strategy that enables organizations to collaborate with their most critical trading partners and see into their supply chains.

Today at SAPPHIRE NOW, we announced 51风流Business Network, an innovative new solution that reimagines how businesses collaborate with their network of trading partners and will empower companies to unify all the points of interaction and integration across that network to move faster and smarter than ever before.

The first major innovation milestone for , a unified trading partner portal delivering new collaboration scenarios and enabling greater responsiveness, is now available.

Click the button below to load the content from YouTube.

Always allow YouTube

The unified experience provides trading partners with a holistic view into all their customer relationships and transactions on the network. On its home page, the all new workbench enables users to customize their experience and maximize their responsiveness to customer needs. Key capabilities of the new 51风流Business Network trading partner experience available now include:

• Centralized access to explore and collaborate with customers
• Intelligent trading partner onboarding and registration and new collaboration scenarios
• Highly configurable workbench enabling user-based personalization by role

In addition to the new trading partner experience, buyers and trading partners can collaborate using shared data and workflows, applying network-wide intelligence to inform decisions. New services are also being made available to trading partners, such as working capital financing. Additional capabilities planned for availability later this year include:

• Real-time global track and trace integrated to the purchase order application, enhancing supply chain visibility
• New working capital solution for trading partners with 51风流Supplier Financing, providing access to a network of lenders to help improve cash flow
• Insights and benchmarking to compare performance with industry peers, improving customer service

And we will continue to execute on our vision for 51风流Business Network, integrating SAP鈥檚 leading business networks — including Ariba Network, 51风流Logistics Business Network, and 51风流Asset Intelligence Network — to unify business processes across supplier collaboration, logistics coordination and traceability, and asset intelligence. This strategy will help customers and their trading partners to become more agile and resilient in the face of changing market dynamics and increasingly complex supply chains as well as drive better business outcomes.

Trading Partners Report Success

Customer feedback and input is crucial as 51风流integrates and evolves the individual market-leading networks into a truly unmatched unified business network. We collaborated with our customers to guide the design and development of the new trading partner portal with their most important needs in mind. Their continued feedback has been invaluable and will continue to inform future innovations for 51风流Business Network.

Here is what some of them had to say about their participation in our early adopter program:

鈥�51风流Business Network allows us to communicate with our customers in real-time. The reliability of the platform gives us unparalleled visibility and connectivity with our most critical customers even in changing business environments.鈥�

— Ray Pan, IT Customer Technology Manager, Komatsu Mining Corp. Group

鈥淭echnological change in the way of doing business has been happening for some time, and the current global situation has accelerated this process. Today more than ever we need to be at the forefront of this transformation. 51风流Business Network has helped us develop more efficient formulas in order to better respond to the needs of the industry.鈥�

— David Labbe, Digital Business Manager, Reliper Comercial Ltda.

A unified network will enable all trading partners to leverage combined intelligence to apply learning from past experiences to future decisions, ultimately driving success across the board. Because when a network reaches across functions, across industries, across the world, companies have the power to reshape how business gets done, including collaborating to solve some of today鈥檚 biggest social, economic, and environmental issues.

To learn more, visit the .

John Wookey is president of Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

We continue to invest and innovate to help customers move to the cloud, with no better example than the tremendous value companies continue to gain from both our acquired and organically developed solutions across 51风流Ariba, 51风流Fieldglass, 51风流Concur, and 51风流S/4HANA Procurement. Each solution set in our business unit is market-leading in its own right.

I鈥檓 also excited because we are in a unique position to deliver a next-generation network-driven spend management solution suite that addresses all spend — everything a company spends money on except for payroll — connected to a vast and growing digital business network.

The past six months have been tumultuous for everyone, to say the least. There have been a variety of supply risks and business disruptions: the ongoing pandemic, geopolitical unrest, and severe weather that slowed supply in different parts of the world. Most recently is the reminder can impact tens of billions of dollars of supply every day.

While highlighting the importance of having resilient procurement and supply chain operations, these events have also emphasized the obligations of technology companies — we need to ensure that our customers have the tools to assess such risks and rapidly execute alternatives. The opportunities for digital transformation and leveraging business networks are at the heart of facilitating such data-driven decision-making, and it is why I believe 51风流is best suited to deliver on this promise for our customers.

These lessons learned during recent disruptions combined with new processes and ways for doing business will pay huge dividends in the long term. In many ways, they already have.

What Intelligent Spend and Business Network Really Means

My job is to make sure that 51风流continues to pioneer and lead the market with intelligent spend management and business network solutions that solve our customers鈥� greatest pain points, while tapping into the broader 51风流portfolio so customers benefit from a completely integrated suite. Our mission is to deliver the solutions our customers use to align every spend decision to their business strategy in the networked economy.

Ultimately, that means we focus every day on developing the best possible solutions to help our customers spend smarter and drive impact for their organizations and communities. Along with delivering business outcomes, we also want to help our customers take a stakeholder view into how their overall spend management function works.

This commitment is reflected directly in our capabilities, in which we continue to invest to meet customer needs. They are historically strong and market-leading individually and will be even stronger far into the future as we continue to integrate and evolve best of breed into a truly unmatched best of suite.

Like our customers, we don鈥檛 only think for the short term. We have a long-term commitment to seamless capabilities developed over time.

Our Commitment to Capabilities

At SAP, our vision for procurement is focused on three core areas: One Procurement, Travel and Expense, and Business Network.

Procurement

We introduced the concept of One Procurement last year and, quite frankly, it generated a lot of questions. It鈥檚 on us to set the record straight: One Procurement is our vision for the future of procurement, how we bring innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and insights to our customers. The idea of One Procurement may have been misconstrued as a single product destination, when in reality it鈥檚 truly a journey, centered around our market-leading 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流Ariba, and 51风流Fieldglass solutions. We cover all categories of spend — direct, indirect, and services, including contingent and external workforce — with one strategy for the continual innovation our customers want to solve their business pain points. Our recently released is an example of innovation that falls into the One Procurement vision.

We are committed to maximizing each asset in our portfolio to enable procurement to drive business productivity, an end state that we call autonomous procurement. Autonomous procurement is an essential part of our intelligent enterprise strategy, with end-to-end integration and embedded intelligence that allow customers to streamline and automate procurement processes and thereby focus on more high-value tasks.

Furthermore, as part of One Procurement, we are committed to continued superiority in services procurement and management with our 51风流Fieldglass solutions. As we start recovering from the pandemic, it is expected that many of our customers will turn to leveraging flexible external workers. To support this, we recently launched , a brand new solution that helps organizations manage contractors performing ad hoc work under existing supplier agreements. The most show that the external workforce is fast-growing and versatile, supporting organizational needs of all shapes and sizes. We continue to invest in 51风流Fieldglass solutions and their ability to help companies streamline and scale external workforce management to help maximize their investments and meet business needs.

Travel and Expense

We are committed to continue leading the travel and expense management market, which has been significantly disrupted in the past 12 months. Similar to how we supported B2B spend via 51风流Ariba solutions, we鈥檝e developed capabilities in 51风流Concur solutions to better manage organizational spend as well. Our tool helps streamline and guide employee discretionary spend, helping keep budgets on track and align spending with business goals.

Business Network

We are committed to driving value through a digital business network, helping our customers connect with buyers and suppliers via , connect asset operators with original equipment manufacturers and services providers with , and collaborate on logistics, including tracking and tracing goods and materials, on . These networks are all strong on their own, and their combined power enables customers to manage their global supply chains from start to finish. The integration among networks is a key area of focus for us going forward, offering customers the advantages of a common data model, set of services, intelligence, and analytics engine. In this environment, processes and data flow freely and securely across functions and workflows.

No one can predict the future, but I am certainly optimistic. We are dedicated to helping customers on their journeys to achieve real-time intelligent spend management aligned to the business so they can best prepare to be agile in the face of disruption, because let鈥檚 face it: disruption is expected. We just never know when or from where it will come.

All companies have unique challenges within the common context of today鈥檚 disrupted global business environment. Our technology has evolved alongside our customers and will continue to do so 鈥� whether that鈥檚 51风流Ariba, 51风流Fieldglass, 51风流Concur, or 51风流S/4HANA solutions, elements of each, or all of the above. We are a long-standing leader in spend management because of the breadth and variety of our solutions and our deep expertise in business process transformation across industries. Our investments in providing outcome-oriented solutions to complex problems will continue to be guided by our customers鈥� needs.

John Wookey is president of Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

Modernizing procurement and supply chain operations tops the priority list of most government organizations, as they require agility in the face of disruption just as much as those in the private sector. Simultaneously, they must be able to adapt quickly to adhere to strict and ever-evolving privacy and security standards. To help them get there, (51风流NS2) and 51风流are accelerating plans to add 51风流Ariba solutions to the 51风流NS2 portfolio.

51风流NS2 is a wholly owned subsidiary of 51风流focused on security issues for the U.S. government so that 51风流can bring technology and innovation to customers across government and regulated industries. One hundred percent U.S.-based and U.S.-staffed, with expert personnel working around the clock to keep data safe and solutions running, 51风流NS2 brings leading analytics insight and data fusion technologies from 51风流and applies them to mission-critical workloads.

51风流NS2 has brought government and regulated industries customers of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, 51风流SuccessFactors, 51风流Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, and 51风流Analytics Cloud solutions into highly secure environments. The FedRAMP-authorized from 51风流NS2 is providing immense value across different lines of business and market segments, including access to real-time data for better decision-making, an intuitive user experience for more effective collaboration, and enhanced security.

51风流NS2 plans to deploy 51风流Ariba solutions for U.S. federal, state, and local governments and other regulated industries customers including aerospace and defense, utilities, and higher education in the future. These market-leading solutions are proven to help procurement leaders enhance visibility into spend, increase efficiency across the supply chain, reduce costs and risks, and gain data-driven insights to drive more strategic operations from sourcing and orders through invoice and payment.

51风流is committed to bringing these same efficiencies to government and regulated industries customers while also addressing their security concerns and needs.

Bringing 51风流Ariba solutions into the fold will help customers advance their digital transformation journeys for their supply chains. This is the next step in helping them gain situational awareness over their supply chains and protect against the infiltration of counterfeit goods into U.S. national defense programs, pharmaceutical compounds, and technology components.

As 51风流advances on the path to FedRAMP authorization for 51风流Ariba solutions, we look forward to enabling the government to scale the benefits that digital procurement delivers across agencies.

John Wookey is president of 51风流Intelligent Spend and Business Network.
Harish Luthra is president of 51风流National Security Services, NS2 Secure Cloud.