Optimize Without Overhaul: Extend and Integrate with SAP BTP for Procurement Transformation

Agility and resilience have come to the forefront as the volatile business environment continues, and for organizations, moving the needle goes beyond process adjustments; it is about a mindset shift, new capabilities in the workforce, and a culture of data-driven decision-making. Organizational priorities continue to center around cost control and risk management in the face of increasing macroeconomic and geopolitical volatility. This has heightened the pressure on procurement teams to deliver cost efficiencies and supply assurance.

However, for procurement teams, this has transpired into delivering on broader business outcomes. Procurement teams are now looking beyond traditional, routine procurement goals to drive significant business value: from developing robust supplier partnerships, managing risk, investing in transformative technology to future-proofing their organization, and reducing time to market. Companies have already started transforming their procurement and spend management capabilities by transitioning their on-premises systems to the cloud, re-engineering business processes and adopting intelligent technologies. With insights generated from such core systems and integrating them with advanced intelligent technologies, organizations are customizing processes to their unique requirements, for faster and quicker transformation.

However, this is not a one-time activity. Organizations need to continuously integrate advanced capabilities into their technologies which is only achievable through innovation and malleability provided by open-source platforms.

Driving strategic value with SAP BTP

Informed procurement and spend decisions, easier collaboration across organization, and robust supplier relationships form the pivot on which the success of procurement depends.

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), a unified business centric platform, enables this by bringing together existing capabilities like analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration. With technologies like SAP Integration Suite and SAP Build, which now offer low-code and pro-code and generative AI, organizations can respond rapidly to change by developing and extending business applications in real-time.

SAP BTP enables scalable application development and integrates procurement with other LoB systems to oversee spend, mitigate risks, streamline workflows, and streamline business processes as procurement requirements change. Case in point is Britvic plc, the largest soft drink supplier in Great Britain, that transformed its procurement and supply chain operations with SAP BTP and SAP Ariba solutions. Faced with outdated systems and procurement inefficiencies, Britvic streamlined its source-to-pay process, using SAP Ariba’s source-to-contract, procure-to-pay, and supply chain collaboration modules, along with SAP Analytics Cloud for reporting for greater transparency and operational efficiency. For the company, guided buying through SAP Business Network now handles 86% of POs, reducing manual effort and speeding invoice processing. The transformation also improved contract compliance, enhanced supplier collaboration, and enabled better spend categorization.

SAP BTP offers many opportunities for innovation and strategic value creation across procurement and spend management processes. Here are several key areas where SAP BTP drives transformation:

Better visibility with data and spend analytics: For gaining competitive advantage, data-driven insights and enterprise analytics are crucial. These empower organizations to remain agile and resilient and enable them to mitigate risk. SAP BTP offers data and analytics capabilities that provide a comprehensive spend visibility across regions and business units, providing key metrics in real-time and offering AI-powered insights. These augment procurement efficiency in areas such as savings tracking with finance and spend reconciliation with suppliers. Through SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere Solution integration and tracking metrics, organizations can increase real-time visibility, reduce risks, improve spend and transaction data.

Creating exceptional procurement experiences: With application development capabilities, combined with process automation capabilities, SAP BTP allows organizations to design and create new processes and applications, extend/automate existing ones, or integrate innovative customizations. Driving intelligent workflows and business networks, this enables procurement teams to streamline processes like sourcing and contracting and purchasing and payment. With its low-code, no-code building capabilities, organizations can build consumer-like user experiences integrated with spend management, allow buyers to deliver better due to optimized workflows and drive specialized procurement efficiencies through customized solutions. Additionally, organizations can overcome issues such as data fragmentation and system gaps by leveraging SAP BTP automation and RPA capabilities to manage manual tasks that are time-intensive like contract, category management to third-party risk management, and supplier relationships.

Streamlining processes with seamless integration: As an organization’s source-to-pay IT landscape spans multiple applications, effective data and business processes must often exist across the end-to-end solution set. This delivers better procurement efficiency and user experience, but also better supplier collaboration. For transactions and spending, integrating critical data and processes into SAP’s spend management solutions helps organizations. SAP BTP facilitates the secure integration of critical data and processes to outside sources or third-party systems seamlessly. The platform ensures integration, extensions, and APIs for source-to-pay processes that are built into the platform to improve buyer experience and productivity.

Intelligent systems with embedded AI: With embedded AI, SAP BTP allows users to interact with procurement and spend data and also generate insights by integrating this with other business data. With SAP BTP embedded AI, companies can automate manual tasks, drive efficiency for buyers and users alike. SAP BTP also includes embedded intelligence with analytics that offers real-time visibility, and smart workflows to streamline requisitioning and procurement. For instance, the challenge of managing manual, error-prone invoicing processes, especially with suppliers not on the Ariba Network, can slow down accounts payable teams. By using Intelligent Invoice Express, businesses can automate the capture and processing of purchase invoices, reducing manual efforts and onboarding suppliers more quickly. The solution seamlessly integrates with SAP Ariba Invoicing, Buying, or SAP S/4HANA, and automates long-tail supplier invoice automation, enhancing invoice accuracy and efficiency, even for non-registered suppliers.

SAP BTP allows organizations to extend and personalize their procurement processes and go beyond off-the-shelf solutions to design tailored procurement experiences. By automating key processes like spend management and invoice handling, offering real-time visibility, and providing a unified view of purchase orders and invoices, SAP BTP fosters innovation and significantly enhances procurement efficiency.

Discover how SAP BTP can help optimize and streamline spend management processes here and gain insights into how to achieve better visibility into enterprise spend at SAP’s Spend Connect Live event in 2024.