SAP Business Suite – Embedded B2B

In the shifted balance of networked business, more and more demands are being placed where our IT systems are at their weakest: external-facing collaborations focused on emerging opportunities. IT systems, like everything else in our businesses, must evolve to meet the demands of global competition. Specifically, they must go beyond their initial mandate—to improve the productivity of internal operations—to take on a larger one, improving the productivity of our business networks. If we measure current IT infrastructures against the evolving requirements of business in a networked economy, we see they are:

• Optimized for internal processes, but weak on external-facing ones,
• Optimized for transactions, but weak on collaboration support, and
• Optimized for mature operations, but weak on emerging opportunities

The focus, as before, is on process efficiency and effectiveness.  The novelty is that these processes now cross enterprise boundaries, creating challenges of visibility and control.  Meeting those challenges is the defining agenda for IT in the current age. No one can afford to simply walk away from this challenge. We all must reorient our IT systems to address this shift in focus or risk seeing our enterprises—not to mention our IT investments—marginalized going forward. SAP and Crossgate have combined the strength of SAP Business Suite and the Crossgate Business-Ready Network to address these new challenges. Joint process enhancements include:

• Financials Accounts Receivables—End users can reduce Days Sales Outstanding, reduce cost of paper, printing & postage, and achieve EU and Latin American Invoice Compliance through pre-packaged e-Invoicing solutions.
  
  
• Financials Accounts Payables—Companies that install an electronic payables solution to handle inbound supplier invoices reported a 61% reduction in invoice-processing costs, according to IOMA’s Electronic Invoicing Survey. Every day, Crossgate receives over 100,000 inbound paper documents that are scanned and digitalized by OCR and manual rework. This is a one-stop service that digitizes paper documents, provides internal Purchase Order matching, addresses legal archiving requirements, manages automated approval workflows to handle discrepancies and posts final documents directly into the ERP system. More importantly, our global Supplier Invoice Network allows you to accelerate EDI with suppliers, get off of paper, and capitalize on newer SAP partner application such as the OpenText Vendor Inventory Management solutions.
  
  
• Supply Chain Management—Organizations can increase the number of suppliers enabled within the supply chain and accelerate the enablement timeframe from weeks to days.
  
  
• Event Management & Guided Procedures—Because of the meta data interface to the trading partner community, there are only a few interfaces required to implement Event Management. Organizations can focus on finding, evaluating and fixing supply chain events rather than trying to integrate disparate partner ecosystems.
  
  
• Supplier Relationship Management—Organizations can accelerate supplier enablement and adoption at a fixed cost rather than failed time and material services engagements. Additionally, more processes can be implemented beyond general procurement to cover all forms of supplier processes including logistics processes and financial transactions such as Invoices and Remittance Advices.
  
  
• Global Trade Management—Customers organizations from around the globe need a seamless connection to customs systems including ATLAS and AES in the United States.  This networked model simplifies the integration and compliance with custom mandates and ensures GTM is in compliance with the required EDI exchanges.
  
  
• Business Warehouse and BusinessObjects—Customers can easily create data cubes to provide actionable analytics to pre-defined score cards, reports and dashboards. The content increases the value immediately of the reporting benefits. The combination of reports from the internal SAP side and an active business network of 40,000 partners creates a new level of Business Network Performance Management. Current development between SAP and Crossgate is focused on automating reporting against SCOR models and other industry and best practice dashboards.