This posting is an update to our previous Supply Chain Matters commentary regarding Ariba, an SAP Company and its announced availability of a new application targeted for supply chain risk management.  As we indicated in that original posting, Supply Chain Matters does not elect to echo technology vendor announcements unless we believe it should capture the attention of our readers, and we get the opportunity to drill down on the specifics and functionality. Ariba teamed up with SAP Supplier InfoNet, an internal incubation business unit to provide availability of this cloud-based application. We have since received a detailed briefing on the functionality of this application, and candidly, we were impressed, for a number of reasons.

First, the application itself is not solely targeted to just a sourcing and procurement user base, but other cross-functional users that have responsibility related to broad-based supply chain disruption and risk mitigation. Supply Chain Matters has always advocated that supply chain risk mitigation cannot solely be owned by an individual function such as procurement, but rather cross-functional or cross-business leadership and accountability. SAP Senior Vice president David Charpie who provided our briefing, indicated that this application’s focus includes Director and C-level as well as cross-functional supply chain and operations management users. Bravo for that decision.

Charpie’s prior background was with supply intelligence vendor Open Ratings, and SAP Supplier InfoNet takes that application to much broader and deeper capabilities. After its internal development within SAP, the decision was made to re-cast Supplier InfoNet on the Ariba B2B platform, powered by the SAP HANA database. While this transition is still a work-in-progress, by our lens, there is powerful potential for the ability to gather early-warning and insights on pending and actual supply chain disruption.

What especially stood out for us was:

  • A stated ability to provide multi-tier value-chain information visibility and insights. When fully married to the Ariba B2B network, that could prove powerful. When integrated with supply chain response management and planning information, it could provide even more noteworthy potential to manage and respond to major supply disruption.
  • Support to allow users to capture many forms of structured and unstructured information to develop a risk profiles among key suppliers. It includes language processing, text analysis as well as social and community-based intelligence capabilities.
  • A user-friendly interface that appeared to be rather intuitive with abundant visualization, data summation and heat mapping techniques.
  • The ability to currently capture upwards of 160,000 external data sources including industry, government, third-party and other sources.  Data can be time and/or supplier weighted.  The application supports pre-screening of data and the ability to gather a lot of hidden supplier intelligence, more than a single individual could capture in a normal work week. We even joked that in order to maintain this blog for our readers, this application would quadruple our productivity. Supplier InfoNet can even tap postings of Supply Chain Matters related to risk events.
  • A Facebook like data model with the ability of firms to control what data actually gets displaced, along with community management of this data, which could prove beneficial when a major supply disruption is occurring.
  • A broader definition of cross-functional performance metrics tied to financial objectives and context.
  • The ability to conduct what-if analysis. Supplier InfoNet’s leveraged use of the SAP HANA platform provides for additional capabilities for predictive analytics to be layered across these combined information streams, allowing for a form of machine learning relative to patterns of information that would correlate with expected outcomes
  • Configuration for industry-specific requirements with eight industry sectors already configured or in-process and SAP Supplier InfoNet is initially targeted to industries with a complex manufacturing and value-chain profiles.

The issue of pricing of the application is not as clear, and as we suspected, customers will have to sign-up for a separate subscription to utilize SAP Supplier InfoNet. We were not provided pricing specifics other than the subscription model may be predicated on the size of the network. We are certainly interested in hearing from SAP and Ariba customers on their impressions of pricing. We will continue to seek out that information since that may be the Achilles heel to wide-scale adoption.

An open question is obviously how timely all of the functionality of SAP Supplier InfoNet can be eventually incorporated within and on the Ariba Network along with a critical mass of industry-specific supply and value-chain intelligence that firms are willing to share.

Bottom-line- SAP Supplier InfoNet on the Ariba B2B Network has tremendous potential for customers and prospects in the ability to provide early-warning to major supply disruption, to manage all pertinent information when that disruption occurs and to provide more predictive capabilities in supply chain risk mitigation. Let us hope that the SAP bureaucracy does not stymie that attractiveness with elongated milestones and unattractive pricing.

Bob Ferrari

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