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First of all let's try to understand the need of supplier collaboration in today's scenario. In the current world scenario, supply chains are getting
increasingly complex and networked with multi country sourcing, multi-level supplier relationships like contract manufacturing, OEM, subcontracting
etc. coming into picture in a big way. Also, with dynamic demand variation, it becomes imperative to respond quickly without creating large ripples in the
entire supply chain.
In today's world there is much broader scope for supplier collaboration, as it is required in multiple areas like quality management, delivery
management etc.
The need for an integrated approach towards supplier collaboration is fuelled by the following objectives:
1. Reduce time to market for new products by using design collaboration with suppliers
2. Reduce transactional costs and paper work
3. Respond to demand changes with agility
The concept of supplier collaboration and its obvious benefits has been known to organizations for long, but the adoption rate has been quite low.
Solutions like Vendor Managed Inventory etc. have been there for quite some time. However these were mainly targeted at Tier 1 suppliers falling
under high volume and high value category. There is still considerable scope to extract business value by looping in Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers under
supplier collaboration program, but the challenge here lies in providing a cost effective collaborative solution.
collaboration along with direct procurement collaboration like VMI, Kanban, PO collaboration and Work order collaboration.
So how do we pitch SAP SNC vis-a-vis SAP SUS. The advantage with both solutions are that both are accessible through web interface and do not
require dedicated network like WLAN etc. as required for EDI interfaces. So, even smaller and medium suppliers can be onboard easily. They also
exchange data with XML messages; therefore it is easy to integrate it even with non-sap backend systems.
As a customer one needs to evaluate its current SAP/non-SAP system landscape, its business processes and future roadmap of supply chain
enablement to arrive at a decision.
For large manufacturing organizations, it makes sense to go for SAP SNC as they can reap major benefits through enhanced collaboration
functionalities. They can do without SUS, however, if services procurement is significant spend; then SUS can be implemented as well.
For services industry like utilities, energy, IT etc., they can do without SNC and need only SUS as the majority procurement is for indirect goods and
services.
At the end, I think, there has to be a trade off decision between reducing TCO and realizing spend savings by implementing any of the supplier
collaboration solutions.