Sapphire introduces SAP Business Network, a solution that reimagines how businesses collaborate with their network of trading partners and is said to empower companies to unify all the points of interaction and integration across that network to move faster and smarter.

The first major innovation milestone for SAP Business Network—a unified trading partner portal delivering new collaboration scenarios and enabling greater responsiveness—is now available.

The unified experience is said to provide trading partners with a holistic view into all their customer relationships and transactions on the network. On its home page, the workbench enables users to customise their experience and maximise their responsiveness to customer needs.

Key capabilities of the new SAP Business Network trading partner experience available now include:
· Centralised access to explore and collaborate with customers
· Intelligent trading partner onboarding and registration and new collaboration scenarios
· Configurable workbench enabling user-based personalisation by role

In addition to the new trading partner experience, buyers and trading partners can collaborate using shared data and workflows, applying network-wide intelligence to inform decisions. New services are also being made available to trading partners such as working capital financing. Additional capabilities to be made available later this year includes:
· Real-time global track-and-trace integrated to the purchase order application, enhancing supply chain visibility
· New working capital solution for trading partners with SAP supplier financing, providing access to a network of lenders to help improve cash flow
· Insights and benchmarking to compare performance with industry peers, improving customer service

Sapphire continues to execute its vision for SAP Business Network, integrating SAP’s business networks, including Ariba Network, SAP Logistics Business Network and SAP Asset Intelligence Network, to unify business processes across supplier collaboration, logistics coordination, and traceability, and asset intelligence.

This strategy is said to help customers and their trading partners to become more agile and resilient in the face of changing market dynamics and increasingly complex supply chains and drive better business outcomes.

Trading partners report success
Customer feedback and input is crucial as SAP integrates and evolves the individual market-leading networks into a truly unified business network. Sapphire collaborated with its customers to guide the design and development of the new trading partner portal with their most important needs in mind.

Their continued feedback will continue to inform future innovations for SAP Business Network. Here’s what some of them had to say about their participation in the early adopter program:

Ray Pan, Komatsu Mining IT customer technology manager, says: “SAP Business Network allows us to communicate with our customers in real-time. The reliability of the platform gives us unparalleled visibility and connectivity with our most critical customers even in changing business environments.”

David Labbe, Reliper Commercial digital business manager, on using SAP Business Network: “Technological change in the way of doing business has been happening for some time, and the current global situation has accelerated this process. Today more than ever we need to be at the forefront of this transformation. SAP Business Network has helped us develop more efficient formulas in order to better respond to the needs of the industry.”

A unified network, claims Sapphire, will enable all trading partners to leverage combined intelligence to apply learnings from past experiences to future decisions, driving success across the board.

The company adds that when a network reaches across functions, across industries, across the world, organisations have the power to reshape how business gets done, including collaborating to solve some of today’s biggest social, economic and environmental issues.

For more information how SAP Business Network works, watch the video here: