All software begins with an idea. In this post we will discuss the inspirations for some of the more collaborative aspects of SAP SAP.
SNC Related to B2B Marketplaces?
An interesting question to ask is how SAP’s relationship with Commerce One influenced its Supplier Network Collaboration (SNC) product. At first glance it may be difficult to detect. After all, SNC is not a marketplace component after all but a collaboration product. It is designed to connect a buyer to suppliers by providing them a hosted solution to login to. In this way it is one (the buyer) to many (the supplier) rather than many to many (many buyers and many suppliers) which is the design of a B2B marketplace. However, at least conceptually, SAP was openly discussing the importance of collaborative forecasting and collaborative inventory back in 2001, at least within the context of marketplaces. So we can’t say we have compared the code of the few marketplaces that SAP constructed with Commerce One, we can see some areas of functionality that SAP clearly adopted from its marketplace experiences and incorporated in to SCM.
Marketplaces and Freight Tendering in TP/VS
One area that most definitely did affect SCM was one of the few marketplaces that was actually semi-successful, FreightMatrix by i2 Technologies. Of all the marketplaces of plastics and electrical components, it turns out that a meeting place between shippers and carriers (or 3PLs) is quite necessary. This allows shippers to place shipment out to bid, and for multiple carriers to bid on the freight. This is now represented by the transportation tendering functionality in Transportation Planning and Vehicle Scheduling (TP/VS).
This Historical Impact of Trends on SCM
While a number of the hyped area of supply chain never became common practice, some of the concepts, such as cross organizational supply chain planning and execution eventually did become incorporated in SCM. What the industry, along with SAP learned in the intervening years between the initial prominence of companies like i2, Manugistics, was that advanced planning was only one component of the advanced supply chain functionality desired and needed by companies. Another lesson, which is not frequently discussed, because it does not promote sales, is advanced planning can not be implemented at just any company. Advanced planning’s main draw, optimization was oversold as a mechanism for supply chain improvement. It was too sophisticated for most clients who were looking for an improvement over the planning capabilities in SAP ERP, but not necessarily ready to commit to optimization.
