01

3 min read

Supply chain agility starts here.

A company’s value rests, in large part, with its suppliers. For example, over 50% of the value creation in manufactured products comes from suppliers.¹ Your ability to collaborate effectively with the suppliers you have, while quickly onboarding new suppliers, is essential to driving competitive advantage in good times and being resilient when times are tough.

IBM clients that modernize supplier onboarding and collaboration are reporting significant business value:³

• 51% more efficient management of B2B transactions
• 60% faster transaction queries
• 50% reduced late orders
• 41% faster time to onboard new suppliers

So, what’s standing in the way for so many other companies?

02

3 min read

Onboarding and collaboration pain.

Unfortunately, despite its importance to the reliable flow of goods and services, supplier onboarding and collaboration continues to depend on manual processes and paper-based communications. As supply chains become increasingly complex, global networks comprised of large and growing volumes of suppliers, the pain of these limitations is too great, hindering competitiveness.

03

6 min read

Build smarter supplier relationships.

Smarter supply chains flex with your business and whatever the market brings. They minimize the complexity of supplier onboarding and collaboration so you can add suppliers faster, as needed. But you can't build a smarter supply chain on manual processes. Digitization is key.

With a modern, multi-enterprise business network that enables reliable, frictionless, secure and scalable information exchange, partnerships become opportunities to deliver better customer and business outcomes. New supplier relationships are established and start delivering value immediately. Insights and predictions flow through the veins of the business network and, with the assistance of AI and analytics, can be put in context and accessible for business users to take action. With a foundation of transparency and trust increased by blockchain, buyers and suppliers can begin working together quickly, collaborating to proactively manage disruptions wherever they come from, and even turning them into opportunities.

Companies are:

• Reducing the time, cost and risk associated with qualifying, validating and managing new suppliers. With permissioned access to a shared view of information and an immutable audit trail built on blockchain, buyers and suppliers operate with full transparency and trust to simplify and accelerate onboarding.
  
  For a leading, global procurement organization, finding, validating and onboarding suppliers was a cumbersome effort that involved time-consuming and labor-intensive due diligence tasks. The process required nearly 70 steps and could take 35 days or more to complete. Using a blockchain-based supplier management platform they now onboard 75% faster and have reduced onboarding cost by 50%. And suppliers can manage, control and share their profiles securely. As business and market conditions change, the procurement organization can quickly find new suppliers with speed and confidence.
  
  
• Simplifying collaboration to resolve disruptions, drive efficiencies, and increase supplier satisfaction for critical order-to-cash and procure-to-pay transactions. A global business network provides security-rich, cloud-based connectivity so buyers can engage with suppliers to onboard in hours or days, not weeks – even with non-EDI-enabled suppliers.
  
  As a result of acquisitions, fast-growing industrial manufacturer Southwire is expanding its network of smaller freight companies. These partners provide a cost-effective way to serve local markets, but they often lack EDI capabilities. Switching from a manual, paper-based invoice process to a digital solution with a web portal that allows partners to simply log in and send invoices, they’ve accelerated processing time by 40%, strengthening supplier relationships. At the same time, they’ve doubled the number of trading partners while freeing up 40 hours a week for the company’s transportation team to focus on value-added activities.
  
  
• Scaling to handle exponential spikes in transactions with quality and speed. A single, always-on platform, available on premise or through hybrid cloud, automates and consolidates complex B2B and EDI processes even in the most demanding environments.
  
  A global leader in supply chain solutions, Li & Fung oversees logistics for China’s Singles’ Day – the biggest shopping event in the world. They integrate with 15,000 suppliers and thousands of customers using a single platform that provides automation and data visibility to catch issues, allowing them to standardize and save costs. With flexibility to scale to handle ever-increasing transaction volumes as well as exponential spikes – peaking at 1.5 million transactions per hour on Singles’ Day, four times the volume of the previous year – Li & Fung operates with speed and accuracy to meet service level agreements consistently.
  
  
• Increasing transparency and trust to proactively address disruptions and innovate business models. Blockchain enables multi-party visibility of an immutable, secure, shared record of real-time digital events across the supply chain. Working together, buyers and suppliers are optimizing supply chain performance and the customer experience.
  
  CEVA Logistics (link resides outside of ibm.com) is helping General Motors shift from producing cars to ventilators. Using an AI-enabled business network with built-in blockchain capabilities, CEVA can offer its customer frictionless connectivity with countless new suppliers to quickly and cost-effectively obtain the hundreds of unique parts needed to make nearly 30,000 ventilators. Together, they’re helping close the gap on critical medical equipment shortages across the US.
  
  
• Getting ahead of supplier issues quickly to mitigate risk – even in times of crisis. Business users, such as order management and accounts receivable personnel, can self-serve to dig deeper into their EDI data. They’re identifying patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious to resolve issues, like payment delays, faster.
  
  The Master Lock Company is cutting through the complexity of tracking transaction status manually. They are finding answers to customer questions in minutes using business terminology rather than IT technical jargon. Business users, such as order management and accounts receivable personnel, can self-serve to dig deeper into their EDI data to identify patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious to resolve issues like payment delays, and faster too.
  
  
• Changing how work gets done so that it is more efficient and effective. Intelligent workflows and digital solutions transform traditional processes. This includes providing new opportunities to find and manage the right suppliers, assuring secure and reliable information transfer, enabling transparency and visibility to meet changing consumer expectations, and creating a practical path to trusted supplier collaboration.
  
  A large home improvement retailer is using a blockchain-based solution to build a new foundation of trust and a culture of collaboration between retailer and vendor. They’re saving time and money with shared visibility into trusted, secure data that allows them to work together to solve problems in real time and accelerate the procure-to-pay process. Even better, with faster resolutions and stronger relationships, they can spend more time innovating and delivering on promises to customers.

04

2 min read

Be ready for what’s next.

The future of supplier onboarding and collaboration rests on the capabilities of multi-enterprise supply chain business networks, direct connections with strategic suppliers, and purpose-built blockchains for complex supply chain processes. Tomorrow's onboarding and collaboration solutions will continue to build on digitization, trust, transparency and intelligence to improve data quality, ensure information immediacy, and optimize processes. They will:

• Extend even further to include more participants in the B2B transactional processes, enabling carriers to be active participants in resolving delivery disruptions, and certifiers and other partners to validate the financial and legal status of suppliers, faster. Linking all parties across the end-to-end transactional flows will drive new levels of efficiency, reliability and confidence in the delivery of goods and services.
• Deliver widely trusted data accepted by government agencies to reduce audits, simplify B2B and B2G procurement and ensure compliance with trade and customs regulations. Time saved resolving disputes and completing repetitive paperwork will be spent more strategically, for example, by driving innovation, optimizing processes and expanding into new markets or regions.
• Become even smarter. As AI continues to self-learn and build knowledge over time with more data, it will pinpoint recommendations and next best actions for each unique supply chain and supplier relationship. Organizations will gain confidence to apply AI in new ways to extend human capabilities even further, for example, by automatically initiating recovery processes to mitigate impact to the business and customers.
• Create new value through new capabilities developed with members of the ecosystem that not only deliver strategic and operational performance benefits, but can also be commercialized. Whether you’re streamlining processes or co-creating entirely new offerings, collaboration with trusted partners in a secure, digitized platform will reveal opportunities for efficiencies and drive innovation.

05

4 min read

How IBM can help.

You can minimize the complexity of supplier onboarding and collaboration, and IBM can help.

06

2 min read

The value at stake.

IBM clients are already accelerating supplier onboarding and enabling deeper supplier collaboration to deliver better outcomes for customers, suppliers and their business.

IDC recently surveyed IBM customers using IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network and additional IBM Sterling supplier collaboration solutions and discovered these customers are realizing a three-year ROI of 335% on average, or 4 USD in benefits for every 1 USD invested. That equates to 4 USD.61 million in average annual benefits per organization attributable to operational cost savings, risk-related efficiencies, B2B and IT management and support efficiencies, supply chain team productivity gains and higher revenue/business enablement.¹

When asked to describe their success, customers shared:

“The total time we need to onboard a new partner has been reduced by 75% with Sterling Supply Chain Business Network. …On average, it now takes less than five business days – creating a profile, mapping, testing, all of those things. Before, it would have been four weeks on average.”

“We’re now delivering 100% on time with Sterling Supply Chain Business Network. …Our business has grown to a huge extent, and we could not have done that with the old system.”

“From a business perspective IBM Sterling Business Transaction Intelligence puts EDI in the hands of business users. It lets them research their own problems when the customer calls with ‘What’s the status of my order?’ ‘Well, did you get it?’ ‘Oh, we did, it’s shipped. Here’s all the information in one shot.’”

In a separate report, IDC surveyed IBM customers using IBM Sterling B2B Collaboration solutions and discovered these customers are achieving 1 USD.45M higher annual revenue per 100 trading partners with the help of these solutions.²

“IBM Sterling B2B Integrator helps us manage multi-billion dollar EDI transactions like clockwork.”
– Pat Ranga, Vice President EDI/E-Commerce, Coastal Pacific Food Distributors

Finally, Trust Your Supplier, a growing blockchain-enabled solution used by global brands, is revolutionizing the process for identifying, validating, onboarding and managing qualified suppliers. With a rich set of features designed for speed, risk monitoring, cost reduction and creating trust, it provides new opportunities to drive value through an extended ecosystem.

Let IBM help you start building smarter supplier relationships that deliver more value to your customers, suppliers and business today, and allow you to respond faster to an ever-changing world. Choose an implementation approach – on-premise, cloud or hybrid – that protects your current investments and integrates with new technologies.

Explore all IBMs supplier onboarding and collaboration solutions.