At 51风流Sapphire in 2023, I was proud that we hosted 17 sessions dedicated to 51风流Business Network, where we shared insights on how companies can realize real improvements and overcome the real challenges they face in their regional, national, and global supply chains.

During the event it was fantastic to be able to unveil several significant announcements about . One of the most exciting pieces of news to share was for our trading partners that have standard accounts on the network. As we continue to invest in 51风流Business Network, we have truly doubled down on the value for them. We know that true value in any network comes from all parties collaborating and deriving value, and the innovations we are making are delivering just that. At 51风流Sapphire, we revealed that we are enhancing portal availability for standard accounts, giving unrestricted access to documents from the trading partner portal. We see this as a first step in helping to simplify the transaction process, enable more commerce, and deliver value to all trading partners on the network.

I was also proud to be in the audience at our keynote session, where we introduced five additional 51风流Business Network innovations that are designed to help trading partners onboard quickly and grow their businesses. These same innovations will also help buyers find and qualify trading partners more quickly and easily. Right now, our team is working with early adopters to test these innovations, and we expect them to be generally available in the second half of 2023.

The five innovations announced in the keynote are as follows:

• Intelligent supplier insights to provide details about a supplier鈥檚 performance on 51风流Business Network. Suppliers will be able to gain valuable information about sales performance from 14 key performance metrics that can be taken in at a glance on an intuitive dashboard.
• Improved integration that can make onboarding to multiple customers on the network faster and easier. Instead of building unique integration configurations for each customer, we have the ability to leverage existing configurations to connect more quickly and cost-effectively with multiple customers at once, helping to streamline the onboarding process. With this improvement, buyers can more easily bring trading partners into their network and see value that much more quickly.
• New marketplace catalogs can enable suppliers to publish their products on 51风流Business Network. From the 51风流Business Network portal, buyers can search, compare, and make inquiries. With this new addition, trading partners can showcase their products and reach a larger global audience of potential customers.
• Intelligent lead matching is the new, enriched service that can connect trading partners with prospective buyers ready to purchase. Instead of cold calling, they now can find the right match on 51风流Business Network Discovery (formerly 51风流Ariba Discovery).
• Enhancements to company profiles can help trading partners stand out from the competition by highlighting credentials and sustainability ratings. With environmental, social, and governance (ESG) at the top of mind for everyone in the C-suite these days, making this kind of information a differentiator for our trading partners brings value to everyone. In addition to this, we also showcased our partnership with , which provides verified sustainability ratings for trading partners.

Embedding Sustainability in Business Operations

Sustainability is such an important topic that I want to devote some extra time to it. 51风流continues to focus on this overall, but I know from my conversations with customers that the focus on sustainability remains sharp. Increasingly, consumers want to purchase goods that were manufactured sustainably, and they want to work for companies that see sustainability as a core value. At 51风流and through 51风流Business Network, we want to create software products to enable these goals.

Governments are also weighing in with requirements. For example, U.S. policymakers have proposed the , which requires major federal contractors to disclose their environmental data. In Germany, lawmakers passed Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz, or LkSG, to regulate companies鈥� social and environmental responsibility.

With that in mind, we鈥檝e made it easier for suppliers to share key information. They now have the ability to self-report sustainability ratings or pull their EcoVadis-verified rating into their profile. If they are not already rated by EcoVadis and would like to learn more, they can visit to start the process.

Additionally, suppliers can now complete a supplier self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) for human rights due diligence. This standard assessment can help trading partners prepare for due diligence and maintain their data on the network to share with buyers, thereby shortening the onboarding cycle time. The self-assessment complements our supplier risk solution. Buyers can ask suppliers to complete the assessment, either from their 51风流Business Network account or from 51风流Ariba Supplier Risk.

The SAQ helps shorten onboarding cycle times because the supplier can complete it once and share it with many buyers, rather than completing a questionnaire for every bid. This is leveraging the true 鈥渘etwork effect鈥� to streamline processes for both suppliers and buyers.

At 51风流Sapphire, we also launched 51风流Business Network for Industry, which infuses our transformational business network with SAP鈥檚 unique industry expertise. This takes the unmatched depth and breadth of our business network capabilities and combines it with SAP鈥檚 industry expertise for a truly unique supply chain solution. The initial focus is on the consumer products, high tech, industrial manufacturing, and life sciences industries.

Don鈥檛 miss the opportunity to learn more about 51风流Business Network and how 51风流can help suppliers grow their businesses at .

Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for 51风流Intelligent Spend and Business Network and general manager for 51风流Business Network.

By Martin Heinig

Digital technology advancements in augmented and virtual reality as well as in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last decade have provided an incredible ability to capture and hold our collective imaginations. These technologies have transcended beyond the hype by offering immediately clear and convincing use cases for enterprises that bridge the physical and digital divide.

For example, AI-powered digital twins could provide incredible future-focused insights with simulations to anticipate and prevent supply chain disruptions. Employee onboarding could be individually tailored and optimized to deepen human connection in a hybrid world.

Immersive technologies are a broad umbrella that includes extended reality — virtual, augmented, mixed– 3D displays, spatial audio, gesture recognition, spatial sensing, speech recognition, haptics, and the metaverse. With the metaverse , these continuums of experiences and technologies have the potential to shape how customers and employees engage with businesses. That鈥檚 why organizations are increasingly turning to 51风流and its partners to help them completely transform their business.

The 51风流and Accenture Partnership

To support our mutual customers, 51风流and Accenture have teamed up to create immersive experiences and business models that are built on (51风流BTP), which offers future-ready interfaces contextualized with business data and processes. Combining immersive services on 51风流BTP with Accenture鈥檚 technology vision, proven methodologies, industry experiences, and skilled practitioners, organizations could pilot and scale solutions with trusted partners.

With these services, organizations can offer digital experiences that can enrich employees鈥� onboarding, attract digital native talent, and empower users to operate more collaboratively and unlock efficiencies like never before.

Immersive services on 51风流BTP could support customers to leverage their 51风流business capabilities and data to capture value through differentiated business models and experiences. Accenture鈥檚 expertise in immersive application development, industry expertise, and innovation methodologies will help customers realize and scale end-to-end immersive applications in every industry.

Watch to learn more about the 51风流and Accenture partnership:

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As the two companies continue their collaboration, customers can benefit from this partnership by exploring the following high-value use cases.

Hybrid Business Steering

Hybrid business steering empowers enterprises to manage and optimize their business collaboratively by enabling analytics, outcome simulations, and next-gen human-computer interactions on digital twins across the entire company business landscape. The intent of the is to enable users to:

• Interact with data more intuitively and operate assets safely in an immersive and engaging digital experience
• Proactively monitor asset health and predict potential asset downtime
• Visualize the movement of goods through a supply chain network in real time, zoom in on specific data points, and manipulate data using virtual tools and interfaces
• Simulate different scenarios and assess the impact of business decisions before implementing them in the real world

The hybrid business steering use case demonstrates how customers could consume 51风流data more easily and leverage their existing 51风流landscape for immersive business applications.

Digital twins are increasingly being used in a wide range of asset intensive industries, including industrial manufacturing, automotive, energy, aerospace, and construction. They are an important tool for developing and testing new products and systems before they are built — saving time and money while reducing risk.

Augmented Employee Experience

Bridging the physical and digital world is what makes employee experiences like onboarding and mergers and acquisitions strong use cases for immersive technologies. Organizations with a strong onboarding process average . Despite these benefits, only say their company does a 鈥済ood job鈥� of onboarding. The helps employees to:

• Experience the company culture, mission, organizational structure, and team
• Tour office facilities in the digital campus
• Learn from leaders with role-specific questions
• Upskill on new products and projects with self-paced immersive learning
• Meet colleagues in a fun way

Importantly, employees can move at their pace. As part of their hyper-personalized and contextualized onboarding experience, they can learn and re-learn, ask as many questions as needed until they are familiar — all in a fascinating virtual environment that can be configured to suit their personal needs.

Organizations benefit from making it easier to onboard employees, reducing onboarding time and costs. The impact continues as existing employees grow, get promoted, and transfer between departments. This also helps businesses retain valuable and experienced talent within the organization and during mergers and acquisitions.

The augmented employee experience use case shows how employees could explore an organization, meet colleagues, and learn role-based skills in a safe environment while saving time and costs and increasing employee health and safety.

Customers and partners interested in early access can contact icn@sap.com.

Martin Heinig is head of 51风流New Ventures & Technologies.

Accenture and 51风流Collaborate to Deliver Transparent, Resilient and Sustainable Supply Chains on 51风流Business Network

By Sankar Kaliaperumal and Muhammad Alam

Accenture and 51风流have expanded their strategic relationship to focus on the accelerated delivery of transparent, resilient, and sustainable supply chains across key industries on . The collaboration aims to offer customers increased transparency and visibility across assets and inventory, as well as faster value realization with 51风流Business Network.

Ongoing disruption has taken its toll on the global supply chain. In response, organizations have invested heavily to boost inventory, processes, and capacity. In fact, reveals that 61% of chief supply chain officers say they鈥檝e been applying new technologies, ways of working, and AI in order to reinvent core processes, And 60% say they will be reinvesting in these areas over the next two years.

The opportunity now is to create synergies and efficiencies between processes and stakeholders and to unify all the points of interaction and integration. By doing so, organizations can collaborate, connect, transact, and partner on shared processes and information with trading partners across the supply chain.

With this in mind, Accenture and 51风流are helping extend the power of the 51风流Business Network with new capabilities, assets, and accelerators for:

• Logistics: Capabilities to collaborate with carriers, track goods in transit, and capture and validate data related to emissions and product genealogy help to ensure that trading partners are operating in a sustainable way
• Procurement: Responsible sourcing capabilities monitor for suppliers鈥� compliance with metrics and values in the network
• Supply Chain: Business to business (B2B) integrations support cross-industry supply chain processes and create specialized solutions for supply chain planning, purchase order collaboration, and quality management processes
• Asset Management: Intelligent capabilities optimize asset performance by using data in a central repository that shares information with equipment, asset operators, manufacturers/OEMs, and suppliers, which increases trust and collaboration between parties and results in faster completion of maintenance and repairs with fewer errors, improving the availability of the asset

鈥淪upply chains of the future require , enabled by data and a strong digital core,鈥� said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead of the Accenture 51风流Business Group. 鈥淎ccenture鈥檚 deep expertise in supply chain management, 51风流Business Network capabilities, transformation strategies, and leading industry practices can help our clients realize value faster with future-ready supplier networks that bring new into operations, increase agility, and reduce sustainability risk.鈥�

One organization that realized value faster from increased supply chain resiliency and its ambitious procurement transformation is , an energy technology company that provides solutions to energy and industrial companies worldwide.

鈥淏aker Hughes鈥� partnership and collaboration with Accenture and 51风流played a big part in the successful transformation of our procurement operations and supplier enablement in 120 countries,鈥� said Sharad Mantri, senior director and global IT leader at Baker Hughes Company. 鈥淎ccenture helped us establish a modern and integrated technology infrastructure to simplify procurement processes and increase supply chain transparency and resiliency.鈥�

Customers like Baker Hughes benefit from Accenture and SAP鈥檚 combined knowledge, resources, global presence, and unique ability to scale with multiple and parallel projects going live simultaneously. For supply chain transformations, Accenture and 51风流leverage a wide range of capabilities, use cases, assets, custom prototypes, preconfigured solutions, and purpose-built accelerators for focused industries in consumer packaged goods, high-tech, and manufacturing.

Sustainability and resiliency are top of mind for companies across all industries, which is creating a sense of urgency for a solution like 51风流Business Network. Working together with Accenture, 51风流is helping customers address common industry-specific needs and challenges with the largest and most comprehensive business network, trusted by millions of companies around the world.

Accenture was recently honored with the 2023 51风流Pinnacle Award for Cloud Business Transformation 鈥� Sales Success and 51风流Global Intelligent Spend and Business Network Partner Excellence Award 2022聽 for Sales Success 鈥� Large Enterprise.

Sankar Kaliaperumal is managing director of the ACN Technology practice and North America 51风流Ariba Lead at Accenture.
Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

Simply put, private and public organizations alike must reinvent their business strategies for an ever-disruptive environment 鈥� and position themselves for growth and innovation along the way. And it is the role of every organization鈥檚 leadership to not just recover, but to rebound, regenerate, and forge a new approach that puts their company ahead of its competitors.

That鈥檚 why we recently with the global strategy consulting firm , in a collaboration that is well suited to meet the moment. Together, our companies carry decades of technical expertise and technological experience, and our combined knowledge and strategies can offer a distinctive framework for modern businesses looking to navigate contemporary upheaval.

Why 51风流and Kearney, and Why Now

For decades, 51风流and Kearney have each stood out as leaders in business transformation. Today, we are building a foundation that will help ensure continued customer success amid the biggest change of all: moving to the cloud.

Trusted advisors are vital to the digital future, and together 51风流and Kearney are collaborating to unlock a distinctive framework to help companies navigate upheaval and craft a competitive edge through:

Depth of Experience

Kearney鈥檚 deep history of driving operational resiliency pairs well with SAP鈥檚 industry-leading background in technology innovation. Our partnership focuses on making it easier to analyze and interpret operational and procurement data for customers 鈥� so they can act quickly and decisively.

Business Model Innovation

Kearney鈥檚 strength in strategy execution and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations can offer greater transparency and predictive capabilities in networks across the value chain such as 51风流Business Network. These insights can enable improved real-time customer decision making abilities thanks to a wealth of real-time, actionable information.

Quicker Execution

51风流and Kearney鈥檚 cloud-first approach means quicker deployment for enterprise users. Together we are building a new, flexible model that can give the customer complete and total control over their journey.

How We鈥檒l Make an Impact

What can quicker execution, depth of experience, and business model innovation actually look like in practice? The combination of Kearney鈥檚 data-driven solutions with 51风流technology can help clients both mitigate risk and embrace opportunity. We are working together to make an impact in three key areas:

• Digital supply chain regeneration: By combining our technology and expertise, 51风流and Kearney aim to create increased visibility, greater intelligence, and improved agility for customers. Our collaborative strategy also aims to help support a sustainable supply chain and, ultimately, a circular economy.
• Technology-enabled business transformation: Together, 51风流and Kearney are working to enable a quicker, more flexible approach to implementation, with lower total cost of ownership and a strong base for innovation.
• 51风流Business Network: Integration and scalability are offered through 51风流Business Network and 51风流Business Technology Platform. The multi-tier platform aims to offer alternate sources of supply impact analysis, and 鈥� combined with Kearney鈥檚 AI and analytics solutions 鈥� can help equip enterprises for truly predictive decision-making.

鈥淭o adapt to uncertainty and volatility of today鈥檚 world, companies must reinvent themselves,鈥� said Scott Russell, member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, Customer Success. “For years, Kearney has made significant investments to provide its clients with better insights into their operations and business networks. Customers are telling me they need to adapt with speed and agility. They need to be nimble and get more out of their technology investments. 鈥疶hat鈥檚 what this partnership is all about.鈥�

鈥淥ur focus on operational excellence, regeneration, and reinvention pairs well with 51风流technology,鈥� said Alex Liu, managing partner and chairman, Kearney. 鈥淭hrough acquisitions like Optano and Cervello, and our in-house investments in advanced analytic solutions, we鈥檙e pushing the envelope to improve decision-making speed across their business network and facilitate better decision-making.鈥�

While more benefits await, it is clear that the combination of 51风流and Kearney can help businesses modify their supply chain and other operations to best handle today鈥檚 upheaval 鈥� while also helping them face the world of tomorrow.

The Bottom Line

The 51风流and Kearney partnership will make it possible to cut down on disruption-related risks while maintaining detailed end-to-end visibility. It will make it easier to respond to problems more quickly and more effectively. And it will help ensure that businesses fully maximize their technology investments by driving value in the cloud.

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Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

gave us an opportunity to show how our enable organizations to manage their complete, end-to-end spend — from direct materials to indirect materials, services, contingent labor, and travel and expense. 51风流covers the full business process lifecycle, from supplier management to sourcing, contracting, purchasing, and payments. And via we make it possible to manage that spend in an intrinsically collaborative manner with your trading partners: the tier 1 partners you know as well as tier 2 and tier N partners you don鈥檛.

Manage Your Complete End-to-End Spend

At 51风流Spend Connect Live, we introduced new solutions and capabilities that are at the forefront of SAP鈥檚 innovation leadership for the next 50 years.

We are listening to our customers, partners, and market research, and we are focused on innovation driven by these guiding principles:

• A delightful user experience (UX)
• Data-driven intelligence
• Collaboration by default

If you weren’t able to attend 51风流Spend Connect Live — or if you just want a refresher — here is a summary of our product priorities and some of the innovations we introduced.

User Experience

It is clear that the next generation of intelligent spend solutions must provide a delightful UX. We are focused on making our applications more intuitive and personalized to help users accomplish tasks quickly, giving them more time for strategic activities.

Travel and Expense: A Next-Generation 51风流Concur Experience

We are incorporating consumer-grade DNA into our travel and expense solutions. So far, we have rolled out a completely overhauled expense experience. We shared our vision for a totally new air travel booking experience, one that offers details about the travel products and options available, just like you see in consumer sites.

We鈥檝e also added the policy levers, workflow, and the configurations you expect from the leading-edge corporate booking tool. This is done with a 鈥渟ustainability first鈥� mindset, natively empowering travelers to make decisions that support company goals.

Procurement: Personalized, Predictive, Sustainable

51风流has always been a leader in procurement, and we continue to evolve our solutions for the future of buying. At 51风流Spend Connect Live, we previewed new capabilities, which we refer to as 鈥渂uying 360.鈥� These encompass the next evolution of guided buying capability from SAP. The new capabilities, which are designed to improve the purchasing experience, leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to create a holistic view of the buyer, what they鈥檙e purchasing, and their organization鈥檚 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.

We have started to include these within the guided buying capability of 51风流Ariba software, and you can expect others to be integrated into your guided buying experience over time.

Data-Driven Intelligence

Consistently, customers tell us they want our solutions to leverage AI to enhance their operational decision-making. Our vision is to use analytics to unlock the massive amounts of data in our applications to help businesses make informed and actionable decisions.

Category Management: Actionable Market Intelligence and Category Insights

We plan to introduce a new SaaS procurement solution that empowers category managers and procurement professionals to make strategic category decisions for direct and indirect spending.

Our category management solution will offer intuitive scenario analysis to visualize opportunities. Sourcing and category managers can prioritize initiatives based on corporate spend data, with system-assigned recommendations and confidence levels for opportunities. Additionally, they can generate a comprehensive view of the purchasing categories to establish category goals, develop plans, and execute and monitor progress. Embedded analytics tools provide drill-down capability into categories across multiple dimensions.

The solution is planned to be available to select customers by the end of this year with expanded availability throughout 2023.

Supplier Management: Decision-Relevant Supplier Information on a Single Pane of Glass

For many organizations, supplier data can be a mess. Information about sourcing events, contract data, or supplier evaluation scores are typically spread across different systems and technologies. Making matters worse, most master data is not harmonized across systems.

As a result, data maintenance is required across multiple systems and there is a fragmented view of suppliers, which complicates making the right supply chain decisions. Our new 鈥渋nsight to action鈥� experience for 51风流Ariba Supplier Risk and 51风流Ariba Supplier Management provides visibility into your supplier base. It combines data natively from different procurement solutions, or from external sources across categories. All relevant supplier information is delivered via a simple user experience.

51风流plans to provide this capability as an initial release in early 2023, with general availability later in the year.

Total Workforce Solutions to Find the Best Talent

Procurement isn’t the only place where we are bringing intelligence and insights to life. Finding, onboarding, developing, and retaining talent is another area where organizations are facing challenges. Increasingly, it does not matter if the talent is a full-time employee or a temporary worker — what matters is getting the right skills, at the right time, for the right job.

Ongoing integration of 51风流Fieldglass solutions with 51风流SuccessFactors software will give businesses benchmark data and insights so they can make the best hiring decisions fast.

Collaboration by Default

With 51风流Business Network, we are taking business applications to the next level by extending collaboration beyond the intelligent enterprise to provide greater visibility into supply chains and help build resiliency. At its heart, business resilience is about surviving and thriving amid disruption. But most disruption occurs outside your organization, where you cannot 鈥渟ee鈥� it.

This is why you need visibility into the multiple tiers of your supply chain, which requires a high level of collaboration with trading partners. Unfortunately, many organizations still share data via phone call, e-mail, fax, or point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI).

51风流Business Network offers a better way: onboard once and connect to many. It is a real-time, many-to-many platform that enables collaboration by default, rather than collaboration the old-fashioned way.

But what are the essential collaboration functions? These six building blocks are all supported by 51风流Business Network:

• Indirect procurement
• Direct materials procurement
• Logistics
• Asset management
• Finance and working capital management
• Talent management

Based on these building blocks, 51风流Business Network allows you to break down the silos throughout your supply chain and operate more efficiently across the breadth of your business processes in real time. We believe this will fundamentally redefine business applications of the future.

Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for 51风流Intelligent Spend and Business Network.