SAP Business Network Aims to Integrate Fragmented Supply Chains

… nothing new, but the need to address it has escalated, said Julia White (pictured above), SAP’s chief marketing and solutions officer, and a member of the company’s executive board.

White, the former Microsoft corporate VP who joined SAP in January, led the keynote with Klein. White also appeared in a subsequent media and analyst Q&A session.

“Obviously, SAP has been in the business network category for a while, but the past 18 months has brought this absolutely to the forefront of the need,” White said. “With COVID, we saw that it is overdue to really rethink how we’re engaging together. I think you saw a great first step of us converging our different emphasis networks into a singular experience. Now, there’s one portal you can see across everything, and also bring so much more value to the members.”

Rise with SAP

Building on the SAP Business Network, the company also revealed new capabilities to automate business processes. The company is expanding its Rise with SAP, which it launched earlier this year for SAP S/4 HANA Cloud, with more modules. SAP is adding procurement and an HR module, along with Rise with SAP for Industries.

Rise With SAP is for organizations that want to transform their business processes and implement new analytics and best practices. The first five industry solutions will be available for automotive, retail, consumer products, industrial machinery and components (IM&C) and utilities. SAP said it will elaborate on those solutions next week.

White said SAP’s partners have embraced the new solutions, particularly services partners and ISVs.

“We’re seeing all of them excited about the opportunity that this is unfolding,” she said. “I think it’s getting to real business process transformation, not just a migration project, which is what services partners are great at. On the other side is applications, the ISVs and the ecosystem of building extensions for our cloud solutions.”