SAP Supplier Management

Achieve actionable guidance and transparency across your procurement processes.

SAP Supplier Management Solutions
Current Solution: Contract & Supplier Management

Strategies for Enhancing the Operations of Supplier Management in SAP

Organizations need to be knowledgeable in Supplier Management so they can interact with their suppliers, reduce potential risk, improve supplier performance, and foster joint intelligence to increase effectiveness from the source to the point of sale.

Ensuring you meet customer expectations begins with suppliers being on time and in full (OTIF). Otherwise, you risk disrupting production timelines, damaging your company's reputation, and spoiling the customer's experience due to supplier issues and sub-par product quality.

Optimizing supplier management is key to instilling confidence throughout the supply chain that you can deliver as promised.

SAP offers solutions such as ECC, S/4HANA, and Ariba which extend to a source-to-pay process across the globe. These solutions provide processes such as guided buying, collaborative sourcing, contract management, operational purchasing, supplier info, master data, inventory management, plan-driven procurement, supply determination, supply management, and payables management.

What Characterizes Efficient Supplier Oversight?

Effective Supplier Management harnesses real-time information, equipping organizations to make faster, more informed supplier risk management decisions that prevent supply disruption. By enabling a supplier management framework, company spend is directed to preferred suppliers and using metrics to identify those that consistently underperform, organizations can plan for more dependable supply sources. Utilizing SAP functionalities, including quota arrangements, allows you to automate your fair share rules across multiple supplier relationships.

Integrating supplier management with other procurement processes leads to reduced cycle time and improvements in performance, speed, visibility, and control. 

What Difficulties Are Present In Regards To Supplier Management?

Monitoring and evaluating suppliers can be complicated and time-consuming. All too often supplier data is siloed and maintained in disparate systems including spreadsheets, that quickly become inaccurate, out dated and often can be very subjective. Without a single source of truth, and an understanding of how to use reporting and scorecards it is impossible to determine whether suppliers meet their commitments or whether we fully understand the supply chain's cost and value.

Put succinctly, you can’t manage what you don't know, and that opens you up to losses and risks, diminished productivity and efficiency, and potential service interruptions. More troubling, a lack of understanding available data and metrics can reduce the ability to react quickly to sudden challenges, a spike in demand, a product recall, or a regulatory ethics violation. And that places you at a competitive disadvantage and can cause financial and material loss.

Advantages of Supplier Management

Supplier Management helps deliver efficient processes, strengthens your relationship with reliable vendors, and identifies those that aren't performing, providing an objective case for improvement or securing alternative sources. Also, leveraging SAP and EDI capabilities, you can reduce non-value-add administrative labor costs and errors, help you track and measure performance against contract, and signal potential challenges allowing you to take proactive actions to mitigate the risks of potential supply disruptions.

Whether it’s optimizing supply chain performance or implementing additional SAP functionality, Reveal’s oVo® methodology helps organizations improve internal business processes, educate users and deploy the smart use of SAP to achieve sustainable, tangible value. By challenging organizations to move away from being transactionally driven and move towards information-users that manage the process and apply knowledge, improvements in agility, service, cost, and inventory performance are achieved. 

Q/A

Q

Why Is Managing Supplier Performance Important?

SAP and S/4HANA Insights
A

Many companies rely on timely delivery, price reduction and service quality offered by their suppliers in order to manage their material cost. As a result, the successful management of supplier performance directly affects the quality of the whole supply chain.

Q

How Can SAP Help Me With Managing My Supplier Base?

SAP and S/4HANA Insights
A

SAP possesses the tools to measure how a supplier is performing in regard to not only quantity and delivery but also an entire evaluation capability to support key performance indicators for delivery, quality, service and price. SAP offers standard reporting capabilities for each of these and can be configured to your specific requirements.

Q

Are There Any Specific Key Performance Indicators That Need to Be Reviewed When Measuring Supplier Performance?

SAP and S/4HANA Insights
A

There are many KPI's that are measured for managing supplier performance. A few are, but not limited to, supplier production capacity, quality metrics, delivery performance, business risk and environmental impact.

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