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

Accenture and SAP have expanded their strategic relationship to focus on the accelerated delivery of transparent, resilient, and sustainable supply chains across key industries on SAP Business Network. The collaboration aims to offer customers increased transparency and visibility across assets and inventory, as well as faster value realization with SAP 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, Accenture research reveals that 61% of chief supply chain officers say they’ve 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 SAP are helping extend the power of the SAP 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’ 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

“Supply chains of the future require total enterprise reinvention, enabled by data and a strong digital core,” said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead of the Accenture SAP Business Group. “Accenture’s deep expertise in supply chain management, SAP Business Network capabilities, transformation strategies, and leading industry practices can help our clients realize value faster with future-ready supplier networks that bring new visibility into operations, increase agility, and reduce sustainability risk.”

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

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

Customers like Baker Hughes benefit from Accenture and SAP’s combined knowledge, resources, global presence, and unique ability to scale with multiple and parallel projects going live simultaneously. For supply chain transformations, Accenture and SAP 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 SAP Business Network. Working together with Accenture, SAP 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 SAP Pinnacle Award for Cloud Business Transformation – Sales Success and SAP Global Intelligent Spend and Business Network Partner Excellence Award 2022  for Sales Success – Large Enterprise.