Digital Supply Chain Green Thursday – SAP Logistics Business Network
Thank you very much for sharing the interest for the topic of this article of the Digital Supply Chain Green Thursday blog series. Every Thursday we will together take a closer look at one of the SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions and how they contribute to sustainability in supply chains all over the world. Have fun in following the blog, we invite you to get in touch with us and feel free to share the blog posts among your peers. Here you can find last week’s article about the benefits of enhanced collaboration in asset management.
Many hands need to work together until a shipment arrives at our doorstep
Already in many articles of the Digital Supply Chain Green Thursday blog series we talked about the rise of e-commerce, the changing customer behavior and the effects on businesses. Additionally, many businesses have outsourced parts of their value creation process to suppliers worldwide. Therefore, managing the material flow in between companies and to the customer is a major task in nowadays business environment. Shippers, logistics carriers and freight forwarders need to work together to ensure that materials arrive just-in-time at production plants or products arrive at a customer within the guaranteed delivery time. The capability to work together is thereby largely defined on business information which is exchanged between the different parties, like purchase orders, shipment status or invoices. Real-Time insights on prices and availability of transportation capacities at different carriers or freight forwarders across the different modes of transport are of significant value.
Networks unlock easy collaboration and better insights
Imagine a network in which shippers can easily get in touch with their carriers of choice for specific transportation needs, where digital freight forwarders can easily onboard to engage in new business opportunities, and where collaboration and transparency come naturally across companies and across modes of transportation. The SAP Logistics Business Network is this network: a network where companies and their business partners such as suppliers can discover new business partners and form powerful relationships. A network that allows them to connect anytime and anywhere. A network where partnerships are supported by transparency to foster efficient collaboration.
A network enables easy collaboration on an order basis
The SAP Logistics Business Network, freight collaboration option ensures efficient and effective collaboration because of standardized services in a public cloud with out-of-the-box integration. Shippers and logistics service providers can participate in the network and jointly manage logistic transactions. The native integration with Transport Management Systems like SAP S/4HANA or SAP Transportation Management makes the collaboration on freight orders even more suitable for businesses and encourage an easily managed information flow along the complete lifecycle of an order. Additionally, tracking capabilities bring advanced transparency and real-time insights into the process – no matter which network participant is handling the shipment. Additionally, carriers can self-book dock appointments leading to solutions that fit everyone. Once onboarded, businesses and logistics service providers can profit from the global scale of the SAP Logistic Business Network. Shippers can easily choose from a broad range of available logistics service providers and digital freight forwarders and the out-of-the-box connection to SAP Transportation Management additionally simplifies the collaboration.
Tailor tracking of critical business processes to your specific business needs
Within the business relationships, delivery reliability gets more and more important. Even in B2B relationships, the expected customer service regarding delivery time, delivery reliability and status updates on the way are based on the development known from the private shopping experiences. The SAP Logistics Business Network, global track and trace option enables companies to monitor critical business processes and goods in-transit in exactly the way they need to. Templates provide the basis and are customized to the specific business need to share transparency in order status, delivery or shipment tracking. The continuous comparison of planned versus actual milestones with real-time sensor information offers exceptional insights and allows notifying stakeholders of exceptions before they get out of hand. Businesses can define rules and triggers for follow-up actions to contain the effects of an exception right away. Early-on alerts on potential disruptions help avoiding costly firefighting and increasing customer satisfaction. This helps to improve efficiency within the business relationship and early-on alerts support businesses to avoid economically and environmentally unfavorable mitigation strategies.
Uphold integrity and customer safety at all times
In some industries like Pharmaceuticals or Food, the regulations on keeping the customer safe are extremely high. This includes being able to quickly identify products which might be affected by defects in materials or ingredients. The SAP Logistics Business Network, material traceability option, which is more closely described in this DSC Green Thursday-Blog, uses SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain as a Service to embrace visibility across the full material value chain. This gained visibility into provenance along the material flow allows companies to uphold highest integrity standards to costumers and regulatory bodies. Additionally, businesses are capable of reacting in a quick and precise way when any material problem occurs, as the effective value network members can be alerted right away to take action before harm is done. This ensures customer safety at all times and enhances the integrity of a business towards the customer, improving brand reputation and trust from customers.
A network is bigger than the sum of its participants
Most of all, the SAP Logistics Business Network is a collaboration platform to break up silos, make existing partnerships more efficient and form new business relationships. As the positive impact of collaboration is always a matter of scale and choices for network participants, SAP Logistic Business Network embraces interoperability with other networks, bringing additional visibility and services to the customers. Together, shippers and logistics service providers can work on integrating sustainability into their daily collaboration in an easier way and make it visible to advertise themselves to other participants in the network to support them on their transformation as well.
If you want to know how SAP Logistic Business Network can support your business and partners, reach out to your SAP contact or have a look at the solution website. Additionally, you can view this video of Paige Cox, SVP Digital Supply Chain Business Networks Development on the importance of business networks for resilient supply chains. Finally, watch this webcast to see how Döhler benefits from SAP Logistics Business Network.
Collaborate in bringing your supply chain into the future – with SAP Logistics Business Network
I hope you found this blog post helpful and interesting. Please make sure you follow me to not miss any future blog posts in this series and stay informed about how a Sustainable Supply Chain is supported by SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions! Please have a look at my earlier posts as well:
DSC Green Thursday: At the end of every tunnel there is a light – will it be a green one?
DSC Green Thursday: SAP Intelligent Product Design – Too many cooks spoil the broth, or not?
DSC Green Thursday: Enable customers to make informed decisions with SAP Recipe Development
DSC Green Thursday: Using SAP Product Lifecycle Costing to lift the fog of uncertainty
DSC Green Thursday: Becoming smarter through Collaboration in SAP Engineering Control Center
DSC Green Thursday: Protecting Planet and People with SAP Environment Health and Safety Management
DSC Green Thursday: Improve Asset Management together – using SAP Asset Intelligence Network
