An overview of the Asian market with a special perspective on SMEs in India

By Koen van de donk, Brainbox Consulting

Procurement leaders have experienced a harsh time when it comes to finding the optimal solution for the vastly changing world of suppliers. The Asian economy is slowly starting to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there is still a long way to go before they are back on the same growth levels as before. To help this process, it is important to look at business needs and trends. These can help procurement leaders to find the most effective ways to improve their procurement activities.  

Asian businesses are starting to gain more confidence in the economy, resulting in a higher will to invest and improve. The growth of digitizing procurement activities has been fairly slow over the last years. A 2021 survey by McKinsey however, has shown that 92% of the interviewed senior supply chain executives intend to invest in improving their procurement activities and supply chain resilience in the coming years. Asian governments have also introduced multiple nationwide promotion projects for e-procurement. While these are mostly targeted at the public sector, there are also organisations that target the private sector. SAP had noticed that the amount of users of their IT solutions was stagnating in Asia. For this reason, they introduced the Rise with SAP program in 2021. Since, they have gained over a 100 new users, proving that their promotion campaign was effective. The rise of the digital economy is one of the main reasons for the significant economic growth. India has the fastest growing digital economy in the world. They will be able to reach a digital value of 1 Trillion dollars by 2025.  

The new interest in digitization has resulted in a sharp increase in ERP usage. ERP systems provide a company with better oversight by implementing real-time data, automated reporting and remote access. Research by Allied Market Research has shown that India is forecasted to have the highest ERP adoption rate in Asia. Different sectors like the finance and HR sector are leading the ERP adoption, meaning that procurement is lagging behind. 

Since India has the highest potential, it is important to see what business needs their SMEs are experiencing. Problems like shipment delays, struggling with large amounts of data and accessibility are stopping Indian SMEs to perform at an optimal level. Shipment delays are increasing expenses and decreasing the credibility of the company. Combined with the difficulty of handling large chunks of data, this can result in a huge loss of efficiency and revenue. The next challenge is the accessibility of SMEs in India. While medium enterprises are often located in a favorable are, smaller enterprises or their direct suppliers are difficult to reach. As a procurement specialist, it is important to find a solution for these challenges. 

Procurement Technologies like SAP Ariba can tackle these problems by creating a clear environment for all procurement activities. It is a digital platform that is easy to access and easy to use. Shipments can be tracked, and data is stored and handled as efficiently as possible. For procurement leaders, it is important to optimize their digitization efforts to keep up with the competitors in the future. 

To read more about Asian Business trends with a special perspective on the Indian market,

Click here to download the report. 

And to begin your digitization journey in Procurement, Contact Brainbox Consulting today. 

You can also contact us via the SAP Partner portal. 

(a summary from a survey by SAP Insights Research Center) – by Pallavika Barthakur, Leader Marketing, Brainbox Consulting.

Supply Chain and Supplier Networks present innumerable challenges for a Procurement team namely sudden supply chain disruptions, loss of cost control, unexpected delays, inaccurate forecasting, demand for sustainable products and services, meeting compliance requirements, managing risks, and ensuring quality. Hence a Procurement Leader is hardly able to change priorities from optimizing profitability and growth while increasing efficiency and mitigating risks. However, the faster midsize companies are blooming up and pacing to achieve profits, a new trend is being observed as identified by a recent survey conducted by SAP Insights Research Center.

The following priorities for Procurement Leaders can be listed from the survey findings, highlighting them here in chronological order:

1. The introduction of New Products and Services brings in increased revenue and is often the priority to remain in the competition and to attract new customers. And steps to bring sustainability in existing offerings, making them environment-friendly and ethically usable helps to retain existing customers. This aid in boosting sales and beating the competition
2. Sustainability becoming a top concern in the Procurement Agenda of leaders, especially in midsize companies, strategies they create and the decisions they make for better revenue and risk mitigation are changing. Leaders are not just focusing on the creation and supply of sustainable products but are also looking for ways to bring in operational sustainability. Procurement has a major role to play here that can lead to business growth by increasing the bottom line.
3. Traditional goals of cost control and spend management were responded to as top priorities by only 44% of participants. Many procurement leaders are now focusing on empowering processes with automation and taking benefits from supplier and partner networks. Covid 19 pandemic-related supply chain disruptions were a major factor contributing to this transformational mindset. So, 36% of leaders now prioritize making operational processes more sustainable while 34% want to ensure they have dependable supply chains.
4. Risk-related evolving perspective is the line next to highlight. Traditional risk factors like rules and regulations of entry, new suppliers in the market, brand recognition, etc. are now being replaced by the importance of mitigating risks pertaining to economic stagnation (43%), employment and livelihood crisis (36%), natural resource shortage (34%), climate change (32%). Also, cybersecurity breakdown-related risks have been highlighted by 34% of participants while 32% highlighted risks due to adverse outcomes of advanced technologies.
5. The survey confirmed that leaders now understand that process innovation cannot fit into any stage but is a flexible requirement based on the identification of critical areas that need improvement to move the business forward, hence they now prioritize innovations necessary and implementation of the same depending on Industry and Automation maturity.
6. Digital Transformation in business functions has been recognized as a critical requirement to improve performance, remain in the competition, and prevent future risks. All leaders have indicated that they are either digitized fully, partly transformed, or ready to transform digitally in the next 2 years. The survey findings as a whole reveal that respondents favor Technological Innovation as a top priority in the years to come. They look forward to technologies to bring better adaptations in new models of hybrid workspaces reducing cybersecurity incidents, while automated business Intelligence needs have also been highlighted.

The research finding finally recommends steps for how procurement functions should transform themselves while keeping the changing top priorities in mind pertaining to Sustainability; namely, to protect supply chain continuity, gain better control of data, respond promptly to supply chain-related risks, adoption of cloud technologies that use enterprise data and developing strategies for critical areas of supply. Being Sustainable in the future can lead to better brand recognition, and reputation, and Procurement Leaders across midsize organizations have now understood that very well.

To read the survey findings in detail, click to download!

Contact your SAP partner to learn how SAP solutions can help your business transform. Submit your inquiry here.

By Ratha Ramanan N

Over the last decade, we have seen network-based startups like LinkedIn, and Airbnb also known as platform businesses create value by facilitating connections between buyers and sellers, this model fueled companies’ revenue growth and profitability.

In the B2B world, how a network-based business partnership on a platform can create a ripple effect in B2B collaboration? Let’s delve into SAP software, that manages business operations and customer relations, what they have in store!

SAP Business Network is one such technology platform that provides trading partners with far more effective cooperation to maximize mutual benefits and achieve operational excellence.

SAP business network has 3 distinct network collaborations, designed for different stages of the supply chain.

–> Procurement collaboration for Sourcing, contracting, purchase orders, invoices, payments

–> Logistics collaboration to track shipments, freight management, Track Sustainability like carbon footprint, emission footprint

–> Asset intelligence to collaborate among asset owners, operators, and service providers with seamless information sharing and feedback on performance.

Lets look into how below 4 factors are addressed in SAP business network

1. Diverse competitive network : One thing is clear, with such a network there will be the diversified supplier and customer base, it will deliver insights on capacity, demand, sustainability, ESG etc.….that provides competitive edge in the respective business.

2. With such a complex set up, can Onboarding partners really be simple ?

Well, the personas to be onboarded are indirect supplier, direct suppliers, carriers, freight forwarders , finance providers, the success of onboarding & continued engagement clearly reply on super simple UI and world class user experience.

3. In such complex setup, how one can tap into MSME network ?

If Covid really taught us anything, it is how MSME sectors really scaled up and produced & supplied the essentials, that saved many lives, if business network can really be simple and inclusive to tap into MSME sectors? will have to wait and watch how it unfolds.

4. Can we build application extensions to solve a unique business challenge in this business network.

This is where SAP BTP has a bigger role to help build cloud-based partner applications and provide seamless user experience with a business network that can solve complex use cases.

In Summary, there is a huge opportunity in the B2B business network for the customers, partners, software partners to leverage new opportunities and solve unprecedented supply chain disruptions and scale company revenue growth and profitability.

Ratha Ramanan

Partner – Product, Consulting & Customer Success

Brainbox Consulting BV

Best Practice # 2: Know your baseline

Have a clear understanding of where you are now, know how much it costs your business to process an invoice, raise an order, these data points help to build a business case for source to pay transformation or be able to track whether you are making progress and realizing value out of the investments.

Focus on delivering information to procurement professionals in a format that answers common procurement questions, such as “what’s the benefit of rationalizing tail spend?” and “is P2P process performance maximizing working capita.

Procurement Officer Survey 2021, found that 91.67% of “high performing” procurement teams are regularly and systematically measuring their ability to achieve cost savings more so than any other KPI.

Best Practice #3: Focus on business process, spend coverage, followed by technology

Most Organizations engage in business process transformation when they need to make a drastic update to existing processes. Using this process transformation methodology, you can modernize your processes, incorporate new technology, save costs, and better integrate your core systems.

Organizations should map out their existing procurement processes, policies, long tail spend categories and to-be requirements, so that an accurate assessment can be made before engaging with any technology providers.

Change management and business process reengineering remain the top two methodologies used to optimize processes on a departmetal or business-unit level, or for enterprise-wide reengineering for operational and customer excellence.

PEX 2021 Survey shows, organizations are looking to business process management at this time to prepare for the future as it will be very different than anything we have experienced so far.

Best Practice #4: It’s just not a tool’s implementation

Digital transformation is not simply about technology—it’s a business strategy that requires organizations to re-envision existing business models and embrace a different way of bringing together people, data, and processes.

Digital transformation is the idea that businesses should utilize new technologies and business models to motivate their employees to be more productive and to provide value for customers.

A comprehensive strategy is much more critical to the success of digital transformation

Digital transformation not only requires process knowledge, but the courage to change the process. Change management, workplace design and collaboration are required for successful transformations. These transformations are not changing at the speed of people, but rather at the exponentially more rapid speed of machines.

True procurement transformation strategies are a multi-facet that include category management, sourcing implementation, contract management, Risk management, buying, invoicing cash flow mgmt., supplier management, team collaboration, cultural alignment, Organization change management, Automation, integration and Spend Analytics, Dashboards for KPI’s and AI based actionable insights.

Best Practice # 5: Going live is just a start

True transformation journeys become successful, when the project momentum is kept alive to implement new features, improvements that adds value to really deliver against the business case.

Measure the success with periodic KPI’s against industry benchmarks to ensure your solution is continually improved and delivers onyour envisioned value.

Assess the implementation and identify opportunities to optimize system performance. Following a comprehensive analysis of data will provide you with a standardized Optimization Report which addresses issues that could be improved to ensure you are obtaining maximum value from your investment.

Best Practice 6: Supplier Collaboration program

The explosion of product customization and innovation, putting the pressure on companies to be fast and lean within their supply chains. Suppliers are such an important factor in the source to pay transformation, explain to suppliers, how this transformation will streamline processes and approvals and provide Real-time visibility into the supply chain operations.

No longer, the suppliers as simply an entity to manage, but one to collaborate very closely for mutual trust and value creation.

In today’s world, the supply chain must be flexible, resilient, and quickly scalable and are able to respond to disruptions in real-time.

There needs to be enough visibility into supply chain operations that companies can immediately respond to changing consumer demands and preferences. Visibility reduces errors, helps companies identify cost savings, find new suppliers when needed, and optimizes procurement.

Supplier collaboration results in mutually beneficial relationships. The more visibility you have into your suppliers’ activity, the better they can serve your business (not to mention, the better impact on your bottom line).

Best Practice #7: Scoping, timelines, people, and Budget

Right alignment with leadership, managers, and business teams to lock down on roadmap, timelines and requirements is required, as this greatly influences success of the transformation including delivering the transformation under budgeted amount.

Right people (employees, 3rd party) with right skillset in right time to handle appropriate roles are required, mostly people will be performing dual roles, hence it is critical to balance the critical milestones and people availability between regular work and transformation projects.

The most effective project management best practices that help manage the projects effectively can significantly improve the results are listed below.

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