Detecting and Eradicating Slavery and Other Labor Risks Across Global Supply Chains through Business Networks

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Ariba and Made in A Free World have joined forces to provide companies deep labor abuse insight into their worldwide supply chains.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Podcast series, coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

Gardner

We're here in the week of April 6 to explore the future of business commerce. We'll learn how innovative companies are tapping into business networks to harness the power of communities to discover, connect and collaborate with peers and partners across the street -- or around the world.

Not only are these leaders better managing their spend in buyer/seller interactions, they're also gleaning insights and intelligence to learn from the past, capitalize on the present, and chart an effective course for the future, all in real-time from a single platform.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next business networks best practices panel discussion focuses on the issue of unsavory and illegal labor practices that may be hidden deep inside supply chains and what companies and consumers can do about it.

We’ll hear from Made in a Free World, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. It's partnering with Ariba, an SAP company, and regulators to shine more light across the supply chain to not only stem these labor practices, but also reduce the risks that companies may unwittingly incur from within their own ecosystems.

To explain practical and effective approaches to forced-labor risk determination and mitigation, we're joined by our guests, Tim Minahan, Senior Vice President of Ariba, an SAP Company. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Thanks, Dana, it's great to be here.

Gardner: And we're also here with Justin Dillon, CEO and Founder at Made In A Free World in San Francisco. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Dillon: Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: Our pleasure. Justin, tell me how Made In A Free World came about?

Non-profit organization

Dillon: Made In A Free World is a nonprofit organization that was started few years ago. I learned about the issue years ago, almost about 10 years ago now, just reading an article in The New York Times, and really wanted to figure out a way to get more people involved, not only in knowing about it, but in finding very practical ways to do that.

Dillon

So that started with consumers, just everyday individuals getting involved and being able to leverage their own network, their personal networks. That's now graduated into figuring out how to get businesses to leverage their own networks.

Gardner: What is the problem we are talking about? Is this slavery? Is this breaking the law in terms of labor regulations? Tell me a bit about the panoply of issues that you embrace.

Dillon: Just for definition’s sake, we define slavery as anyone who is being forced to work without pay under threat of violence, being economically exploited and unable to walk away. There are over 30 million people who fall under that definition today. In some cases, these people find themselves in the sex industry, but in most cases, they're in informal sectors, agricultural or service industries, much of which is finding its way into supply chains.

Part of what we believe is that we have to find a way to be able to connect the dots and figure out how we can use the systems that currently exist to protect the world's most vulnerable resource.

Gardner: Justin, you've been working on this for 10 years, but Tim, why is this becoming such an important issue now for businesses?

Minahan: Over the past decade, as companies begin to outsource more processes and manufacturing and assembly to low-cost regions, they've really looked to drive the cost down. Unfortunately, what they haven't done is really take a look at their sub-tier supply chain.

Minahan

So they might have outsourced a process, but they didn't outsource accountability for the fact that there may be forced labor in their suppliers' suppliers. That's a real issue, getting that transparency into that problem, understanding whether there's a potential risk for the threat of forced labor in a sub-tier supply chain.

Gardner: How big of a problem is this in terms of scope, depth and prevalence? Is this something that happens from time to time in rare instances or is this perhaps something that's quite a bit more common than most people think?

Minahan: Dana, this is far more pervasive than most people think. Slavery really has no boundaries. There are incidences of forced labor in all industries, from conflict minerals in the Congo to fishing in Malaysia to, unfortunately, migrant workers right here in the United States.

Gardner: Justin, any additional depth that you can add to how this manifests itself and how common it really is?

Palm oil problem

Dillon: It's really not a problem that “exists over there." Just one statistic alone: by 2020, half of all the products you can purchase in a grocery store will have a commodity, palm oil, which has a huge incidence of forced labor, particularly around the Malaysia region and Indonesia.

This small commodity, mostly because it's so easy to pick and harvest, is now finding its way into a myriad of products -- and that's just in agriculture.

Gardner: Why should companies be concerned? Isn’t that someone else's issue, if it’s below the level of their reach?

Minahan: You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t really outsource accountability. Secondly, there is a big movement afoot from regulators, both here in the United States, Federal laws, California state laws, as well as overseas in the UK to hold companies accountable, not just for their first-tier supply chain, but for their sub-tier supply chain.

Gardner: And, Justin, of course visibility being so prominent now -- a camera around every corner, social media -- people can easily react and irreparable damage to a company's reputation. Do you have any examples of where this has come to bear, where not knowing what's going on within your supply chain can be such an issue economically and otherwise?

You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t really outsource accountability.

Dillon: Well, people love to hate the ones they love. So everyone is complaining about Apple products, while they're using their Apple iPhone. But in a recent article in The New York Times, one of the supply-chain folks for Apple said that the days of sloppy globalization is over and they're taking this quite seriously. I would argue that some Apple's work is some of the most innovative human rights work that we've seen.

They've dug deeper down into the sub-tier suppliers and, if their reputation as innovators has anything to do with their products, it certainly has to do with their supply chain as well. They are a great example of a company who sees these challenges, sees the connection to not only their brand, but also to their products and they're taking some remediation work against it.

Gardner: Okay, we understand the depth of the issue and why it’s important. Now, now how do we do get the tools to combat this effectively? What have you done? I understand you have a database, and it’s ongoing. Tell me a little bit about the tools that you’re bringing to bear to solve this problem and to help companies take better accountability.

Dillon: The most important thing to do first is to realize where we are in history. We aren't operating in the 1990s anymore, in the sweatshop era. That was an era that where we found problems in supply chains and we started to build solutions around that, auditing, monitoring, all the rest of that. That was 25 years ago.

Era of big data

We're now in the 21st Century, in the era of big data, and we need to be able to use those tools to be able to combat 21st Century problems. For us as an organization, we've realized this was a space where we could be helpful to business. Our mission is to use the free market to free people. That’s what we do as an organization.

We've realized that there is a lot of data missing, and there is a lot of synthesis of data missing. So we, as an organization, decided to pull together the bible of databases, when it comes to supply chains, the UNSPSC. Then, we built off of that taxonomy a risk analysis on every single thing good, service, or commodity that can be bought or sold. That becomes the lingua franca, so to speak, when it comes to supply chain, risk management.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any sector, to leverage their influence to the extent that they can. We've recognized that you can't be everywhere at all times but you’re somewhere at some times and that's the place we feel like any company can make the greatest influence.

Gardner: Now, Tim, the labor issues that we’re talking about are certainly a risk issue, but at the same time, we’re looking to find more ways to automate and make visible other types of risk, any kind of risk, in the supply chain in procurement, buy-and-sell environment.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any sector, to leverage their influence to the extent that they can.

Tell us a little bit about how this particular risk fits into a larger risk category, and then how the databases for each of them, or many of them, come together for a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Minahan: As Justin said, the information here is shining a light on a particular issue, being able to mass, for the very first time, data points from hundreds of different data sources around the world to predict and project the threat of forced labor.

Extending that further, that's one risk indicator that companies need to manage. Companies are managing a whole host of sustainability issues around social and eco-responsibility, but also financial risk, and threat of disruption risk.

Being able to pull all those together into a common risk factor is what we're attempting to do through the power of business networks. By connecting the world’s businesses and connecting their supply chains and automating their processes, that was phase one.

Phase two is harnessing all the information from all of those interactions to provide a better level of visibility that raises that transparency for everyone. Then, you can predict future risk. Being able to tap into what Made In A Free World has done in this particular area, pull that into the network, and expose that as another risk factor that companies can evaluate is a very powerful opportunity for us together.

Gardner: As we've seen in other aspects of the networked economy, the better the data, the more influence, the more action as a result of that data, that encourages more people to see value and add more data back into the pool and so on and so forth. Tell us a little bit about the news here at Ariba LIVE and how that works into this notion of a virtuous adoption cycle.

New partnership

Minahan: Ariba and Made In A Free World are announcing a new partnership to bring the power of the Made In A Free World database together for predictive analytics of forced labor with the power of the Ariba toolset and the Ariba Network to help the Global 2000 and beyond be able to have the transparency they need to identify potential risk, in this case, of forced labor and their supply chain, and be able to take action and rectify it.

Gardner: Justin, how do you see this announcement benefiting your cause?

Dillon: Well, it moves us past the point of saying there is nothing that you can do as a company. That is no longer an option on the table. What you're going to do is the next question. We have removed the word "if" in this conversation -- and we couldn’t have done that without Ariba.

Gardner: Is the awareness that you are creating from such announcements also impacting what happens in the public sector and in the regulation field?

Dillon: It truly is a virtuous tsunami of activity that’s happening in government. We've been doing this for a while, and we've realized that it requires the public, the non-governmental organization, and the media. We all create this ecology of movement around this, but we're seeing this happen in the federal government as well, particularly for our country’s supply chain, the biggest buyer in the world.

That’s exactly what Ariba and Made In A Free World are trying to do --  provide the tools necessary for companies to get started.

There are now standards that are not suggestions. And being able to step up to those standards and exceed in those standards is going to become the new normal. We're a part of that database as well, if you will, that network. And we can see how the Ariba Network is going to be helpful in that, because companies are coming to us and coming at the federal government saying, "What are we supposed to do? How do we move forward? This seems like a huge problem." They're right, and the solution is right in front of them.

Gardner: Tim, for organizations that are now more aware of this problem, and of the general risk issue across supply chains, how do they start? Where do they go to begin the process for getting better control that allows them to have better accountability?

Minahan: That’s exactly what Ariba and Made In A Free World are trying to do --  provide the tools necessary for companies to get started. We mentioned together the technical solution that we 're bringing to bear to allow folks within the Ariba community to be able to access the Made In A Free World input and be able to project potential issues of forced labor in their supply chain.

We've been working together as organizations for a number of years now and we've been working collectively with the Ariba customer community to help understand this issue, to help dig into this issue, and begin to share best practices on how to get started. Together, through that effort, we've developed a playbook that provides suggested guidelines for folks to get started.

In addition, there is a whole ecosystem of companies that are really looking at this issue hard. The thing that’s most exciting about it is that everyone is very transparent and they're willing to share. So you have companies from Patagonia to Apple and the like that are sharing their practices freely, because this is an issue that we want to address. The business world has the opportunity to address probably the most serious issue facing us today, and that is modern slavery.

Learning more

Gardner: Justin, any suggestions for resources that companies and individuals can go to, to learn more about this to take a start themselves?

Minahan: Well, you can’t fix what you don’t know about. You can’t improve without having some understanding of where you fit in the mix. We believe that data and doing an analysis on the freedom platform is the best way for a company to get started.

We think it’s the best synthesis of practices, data, influence, and the network effect that anyone can begin to take. We suggest that they start to look at their own risk based on what they are buying and based on their own exposure. Every company that comes to us, we're able to do this risk analysis with them, and they're are getting new insights.

What’s great about being at this point in the story is that we're already getting from our partner companies ideas about how to improve and what to do better. We have every expectation that our partnership with Ariba is going to improve this tool, not just for us, but for the planet.

We have every expectation that our partnership with Ariba is going to improve this tool, not just for us, but for the planet.

Gardner: Just quickly, Justin, how does it work? When a company comes in and gives you information about who their suppliers are, how do you come up with inference, insight and some sort of a predictive capability that identifies the risk or the probability that they could be in trouble?

Dillon: We are using all the best databases that currently exist on the issue. Everything from forced-labor databases to child-labor databases to rule-of-law, governance, migration, trade flows. All of that is synthesized into an algorithm that can be applied to any individual’s spend data. You're able to get a dashboard on all that spend, which gives you some optics into your sub-tier suppliers, which is where we need the optics. It’s not a crystal ball, but it’s the next best thing.

Gardner: It strikes me that this is a game of numbers. If enough companies examine their supply chain sufficiently and then eradicate the areas where there is trouble, the almighty Dollar, Peso, or what currency it may be, comes to bear, and things like corruption don’t work and bad labor practices don’t get supported. Is this a rolling-thunder sort of thing. If so, what’s the timeframe? Is this something that can be solved in a fairly short amount of time if people actually come together and work on it?

Dillon: To me, it’s the greatest story ever told. This is the thing that we all appreciate, and frankly we all benefit from it. We're all benefiting from a free market and the way that we look at change in our organization is that we say that change is more about judo than karate. How can we use the force against itself to actually change it, and the marketplace is the way to do that.

So yes, this can move quite quickly. In my opinion, it's much quicker than governments can move. We think that they're going to be followers in this case and we highly expect them to be followers.

Gardner: Tim, if companies do this right, if they leverage data, if they examine risk properly, what do they get, other than of course the direct reduction of that particular risk? It strikes me that we are not just tackling risk, but we're putting into place systematic ability to manage risk over time, which is way more powerful. Is that what we're going to get?

Looking at risk

Minahan: Absolutely. Companies are looking at risk holistically, and this is one key vital input into that. As they continue to address that and, as Justin said, we're using free markets as a powerful lever to free people. They can, through their buying patterns and their buying policies, begin to adjust the market, shine a light not just on their own supply chain but change the sub-tier supply chain practices to make sure that there is fair labor. It becomes unappealing to have forced labor and it becomes a detriment to their ability to win new business by doing that.

That's really what the power of data and the power of business networks can deliver in this scenario.

Gardner: Last word to you, Justin. What’s missing here? What did we not talk about that a company should be aware of in order to get a better handle on this to benefit themselves, the ecosystem,, and ultimately workers in a far-off land perhaps.

Dillon: Businesses are the heroes in the story. It's not the non-profit, and it’s not government. Anytime you associate business with human rights, businesses are often qualified as Darth Vader who actually think that they are Luke Skywalker in the story. And for us an Ariba, I don’t need to put that on them, but we are just Yoda.

We're giving them the tools that they need to fight the evil empire and we are going to do it together and celebrate it together.

We're giving them the tools that they need to fight the evil empire and we are going to do it together and celebrate it together. But this is one thing that we'll have to do in concert. We all have individual roles to play, and business has a very clear, distinct role to play.

Gardner: Very good, I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been exploring the issue unsavory and illegal labor practices that may be hidden deep inside supply chains and what companies and consumers can do about it.

So a big thanks to our guests, Tim Minahan, the Senior Vice President of Ariba, an SAP Company. Thank you, Tim.

Minahan: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And we've also been joined by Justin Dillon, CEO and Founder at Made In A Free World in San Francisco. Thanks, Justin.

Dillon: Thanks so much.

Gardner: And thank you to our audience for joining this special Podcast coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Ariba and Made in A Free World have joined forces to provide companies deep labor abuse insight into their worldwide supply chains. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Big Data Meets the Supply Chain — SAP’s Supplier InfoNet and Ariba Network Enable Companies to Predict and Manage Supplier Risk

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how companies can get a better handle on supply-chain risk using big data and community involvement.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here to explore the latest in collaborative commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping into the networked economy.

Gardner

We’ll see how these companies are improving their real-time business productivity and sales, along with building far-reaching relationships with new business partners and customers.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next interview focuses on how improved visibility analytics and predictive responses are improving supply-chain management. We’ll now learn how SAP’s Supplier InfoNet, coupled with the Ariba Network, allows for transparency in predictive analytics to reduce risk and supplier relationships.

To learn more about how the intelligent supply chain is evolving please join me now in welcoming our guests, David Charpie, Vice President of Supplier InfoNet at SAP, and Sundar Kamakshisundaram, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Ariba, an SAP company.

Sundar, let me start with you. From a general perspective, what sort of trends or competitive pressures are making companies seek better ways to identify, acquire, or manage information and data to have a better handle on their supply chains?

Kamakshisundaram

Kamakshisundaram: The pressures are multifaceted. To start with, many organizations are faced with globalization pressure. Finding the right suppliers who can actually supply both the product and service at the right time is a second challenge. And the third challenge many companies grapple with right now is the ability to balance savings and cost reductions with risk mitigation.

These two opposing variables have to be in check in order to drive sustainable savings from the bottom line. These challenges, coupled with the supply-chain disruptions, are making it difficult not only to find suppliers, but also to get the right product at the right time.

Gardner: When we talk about risk in a supply-chain environment what are we really talking about? Risk can be a number of things in a number of different directions.

Many variables

Kamakshisundaram: Risk, at a very high level, is composed of many different variables. Many of us understand that risk is a function of, number one, the supply. If you don’t have the right supplier, if you don’t have the right product at the right time, you have risk.

And, there is the complexity involved in finding the suppliers to address needs in different parts of the world. You may have a supplier in North America, but if you really want to expand your market share in the Far East, especially in China, you need to have the right supply chain to do that.

Companies traditionally have looked at historical information to predict risk. And this is no longer enough because more and more, supply chains are becoming complex. Supply chains are affected by the number of globalized variables including the ability to have suppliers in different parts of the world, and also other challenges which will make risk more difficult to predict in the long run.

Gardner: David Charpie, where do you see the pressures to change or improve how supply-chain issues are dealt with, and how do you also define the risks that are something to avoid in supply-chain management?

Charpie: When we think about risk we’re really thinking about it from two dimensions. One of them is environmental risk. That is, what are all the factors outside of the company that are impacting performance?

Charpie

That can be as varied as wars, on one hand, right down to natural disasters and other political types of events that can also cause them to be disrupted in terms of managing their supply base and keeping the kind of cost structure they are looking for.

The other kind are more inherent operational types of risks. These are the things like on-time performance risk, as Sundar was referring to. What do we have in terms of quality? What do we have in terms of product and deliverables, and do they meet the needs of the customer?

As we look at these two kinds of risks, we’ve seen increasing amounts of disruption, because we’re in a time where the supply chains are getting much longer, leaner, and more complex to manage. As a result of that, you’re seeing that over 40 percent of interruptions right now are caused by interruptions in the supply chain downstream, tiers two, tier three, all the way to tier N.

So now we need a different way of managing suppliers than we had in the past. Just working with them and talking to them about how they do things and what they do isn’t enough. We need to understand how they’re actually managing their suppliers, and so on, down the line.

Gardner: So, it’s a world where there's more complexity, much more of a time crunch, real time, and very little margin for error?

Charpie: Very little.

Predicting risk

Gardner: We’ve brought two things together here, SAP’s Supplier InfoNet and Ariba Network. What is it about these two things coming together that gives us the ability to analyze or predict, and therefore reduce, risk?

Charpie: To be able to predict and understand risk, you have to have two major components together. One of them is actually understanding this multi-tiered supply chain. Who is doing business with whom, all the way down the line, from the customer to the raw material in a manufacturing sense? To do that you need to be able to bring together a very large graph, if you will, of how all these companies are inter-linked.

And that is ultimately what the Ariba Network brings to bear. With over 1.5 million companies that are inter-linked and transacting with each other, we can really see what those supply chains look like.

The second piece of it is to bring together, as Sundar talked about, lots of information of all kinds to be able to understand what’s happening at any point within that map. The kinds of information you need to understand are sometimes as simple as who is the company, what do they make, where are they located, what kind of political, geopolitical issues are they dealing with?

What we find is that suppliers don’t behave the same for everybody.

The more complex issues are things around precisely what exact product are they making with what kind of requirements, in terms of performance, and how they’re actually doing that on a customer-by-customer basis. What we find is that suppliers don’t behave the same for everybody.

So InfoNet and the network have come together to bring those two perspectives, all the data about how companies perform and what they are about with this interconnectedness of how companies work with each other. That really brings us to the full breadth of being able to address this issue about risk.

Gardner: Sundar, we have a depth of transactional history. We have data, we have relationships, and now we’re applying that to how supply chains actually behave and operate. How does this translate into actual information? How does the data go from your systems to someone who is trying to manage their business process?

Kamakshisundaram: A very good question. If you take a step back and understand the different data points you need to analyze to predict risk, they fall into two different buckets. The first bucket is around the financial metrics that you typically get from any of the big content providers you have in place. We can understand how the supplier is performing, based on current data, and exactly what they’re doing financially, if they’re a public company.

The second aspect, through the help of Ariba Network or Supplier InfoNet, is the ability to understand the operational and the transactional relationship a supplier has in place to predict how the supplier is going to behave six-to-eight months from now.

For example, you may be a large retailer or a consumer packaged goods (CPG) organization, maybe working with a very large trucking company. This particular trucking company may be doing really well and they may have great historical financial information, which basically puts them in a very good shape.

Financial viability

But if only one-third of the business is from retail and CPG and the remaining two-thirds comes from some of the challenging industries, all of a sudden, operational and financial viability of the transportation supply chain may not look good. Though the carrier's historical financials may be in good shape, you can’t really predict how the supplier is going to have working capital management in terms of cash available for them to run the business and maintain the operation in a sustainable manner.

How does Ariba, Ariba Network, and InfoNet help? By taking all the information across this multitude of variables, not only in a financial metrics, but also the operational metrics, and modeling the supply chain.

You don’t limit yourself with the first tier or second tier, but go all the way to the multi-tier supply chain and also the interactions that some of these suppliers may have with their customers. It will help you understand whether this particular supplier will be able to supply the right product and get you the right product to your docks at the right time.

Without having this inter-correlation of network data well laid out in a multi-tier supply chain, it would have been almost impossible to predict what is going to happen in this particular supply-chain example.

These are models that behave more like the human brain than like some of the statistical math we learned when we were back in high

Gardner: So, David, it sounds to me as algorithmic or as if a score card is there. Is that the right way to look at this, or is it just making the data available for other people to reach conclusions that then allows them to reduce their risk?

Charpie: There absolutely is an algorithmic component to this. In fact, what we do in Supplier InfoNet and with the Ariba Network is to run machine-learning models. These are models that behave more like the human brain than like some of the statistical math we learned when we were back in high school and college.

What it looks for is patterns of behavior, and as Sundar said, we’re looking at how a company has performed in the past with all of their customers. How is that changing? What other variables are changing at the same time or what kinds of events are going on that may be influencing them?

We talked about environmental risk a bit ago. We capture information from about 160,000 newswire sources on a daily basis and, on an automated basis, are able to extract what that article is about, who it’s about, and what the impact on supply chain could be.

By integrating that with the transactional history of the Ariba Network and by integrating that with all the linkage on who does business with whom, we can start to see a pattern of behavior. That pattern of behavior can then help us understand what’s likely to happen moving forward.

To make it a little more concrete, let’s take Sundar’s example of a company having financial trouble. If I take a company, for example, under $100 million, what we have found is that if we see a company that begins to deliver late, within three months of that begins to have quality problems, and within two months or less begins to have cash-flow problems and can’t pay their bills on time, we may be seeing the beginning of a company that’s about to have a financial disaster.

Interestingly, what we find is for the pattern that really means something, after those three events. If they begin paying their bills on time all of a sudden, that’s the worst indicator there possibly could be. It’s very counterintuitive, but the models tell us that when that happens, we’re on the verge of someone who will go bankrupt within two to three months of that time frame.

Delivery model

Gardner: Now I can see why this wasn’t something readily available until fairly recently. We needed to have a cloud infrastructure delivery model. We needed to have the data available and accessible. And then we needed to have a big data capability to drive real-time analysis across multiple tiers on a global scale.

So here we are, Ariba LIVE 2014. What are we going to hear when can people start to actually use this? Where are we on the timeline for delivery in this really compelling value?

Kamakshisundaram: Both Supplier InfoNet and Ariba Network are available today for customers, so that they can continue to leverage these solutions. With the help of SAP’s innovation team, we’re planning to bring in additional solutions that not only help customers look at real-time risk modeling, but also more of predicted analytical capability show.

Gardner: What are some key features, and perhaps some business benefits that you’ll be taking out to a wider audience over the next several months?

They can identify the suppliers they want to track to as many as the entire supply base.

Charpie: In terms of the business benefits in what we are offering, the features that really bring to life this notion of integrating the Ariba Network with InfoNet are, first and foremost, an ability to push alerts to our customers on a proactive basis to let them know when something is happening within their supply chain and could be impacting them in any way whatsoever.

That is, they can set their own levels. They can set what interests them. They can identify the suppliers they want to track to as many as the entire supply base. We will track those on an automated basis and give them updates to keep them abreast of what’s happening.

Second, we’re also going to give them the ability to monitor the entire supply base, from a heat-map perspective, to strategically see the hot pockets -- by industry, by spend, or by geography -- that they need to pay particular attention to.

Third, we’re also going to bring to them this automated capability to look at these 160,000 newswire sources and tell them the newswires that they need to pay attention to, so they can determine what kind of actions can they take from those, based on the activity that they see.

We’re also going to bring those predictions to them. We have the ability now to look at and predict performance and disruption and deliver those also as alerts, as well as deeper analytics. By leveraging the power of HANA, we’re able to bring real-time analysis to the customer.

They have those tools today, and so it’d be creating a totally personalized experience, where they can look at big data, look at it the way they want to, look at it the way that they believe risk should be measured and monitored, and be able to use that information right there and then for themselves.

Sharing environment

Last, they also have the ability to do this in an environment where they can share with each other, with their suppliers, and with others in the network, if they choose. What I mean by that is the model that we have used within Supplier InfoNet is very much like you see in Facebook.

When you have a supplier and you would like to see more of their supply base you request that you can see that, much like friending someone on Facebook. They will open up that portion -- some, little, none -- of their supply base that they would like you to be able to have access to. Once you have that, you can get alerts on them, you can manage them, and you can get input on them as well.

So there’s an ability for the community to work together, and that’s really the key piece that we see in the future, and it’s going to continue to expand and grow as we take InfoNet and the Network out to the market.

Gardner: So certainly for many companies this is a make-or-break type of capability. The cost that could be incurred if issues crop up in your supply chain before you have that some advance notice can be devastating. But, of course, not having the information yourself prevents you from getting it. So it seems to me there has to be something you do to a third-party that has access to the data across the supply chain.

Focusing on a certain industry and having the suppliers only in that particular industry will give you only a portion of that information to understand and predict risk.

Do you have any examples, Sundar, of organizations that demonstrate one, the very high stakes involved with doing this properly, and two, the fact that you really couldn’t do this as a single organization looking into a supply chain -- how it has to be a cooperative effort?

Kamakshisundaram: If you take a step back, you can see why companies haven’t been able to do something like this in the past. There were analytical models available. There were tools and technologies available, but in order to build a model that will help customers identify a multi-tier supply chain risk, you need a community of suppliers who are able to participate and provide information which will continue to help understand where the risk points are.

As David mentioned, where is your heat map? What does it say? And also, point to how you not only collect the information, but what kind of mitigating processes you have to put in place to mitigate those risks.

In certain industries, we see certain trends, whether it’s automotive or aerospace. A lot of the suppliers that are critical in these industries are cross-industry. Focusing on a certain industry and having the suppliers only in that particular industry will give you only a portion of that information to understand and predict risk.

And this is where a community where participants actively share information and insights for the greater good helps. And this is exactly what we’re trying to do with the Ariba Network and Supplier InfoNet.

Gardner: I’m trying to help our listeners solidify their thinking of how this would work in a practical sense in the real world. David, do you have any use-case scenarios that come to mind that would demonstrate the impact and the importance and reinforce this notion that you can’t do this without the community involvement?

Case study

Charpie: Let’s start with a case study. I’m going to talk about one of our customers that is a relatively small electronics distributor.

They signed on to use InfoNet and the Ariba Network to better understand what was happening down the multiple tiers of their supply chain. They wanted to make sure that they could deliver to their ultimate customers, a set of aerospace and defense contractors. They knew what they needed, when they needed it, and the quality that was required.

To manage that and find out what was going to happen, they loaded up Supplier InfoNet, began to get the alerts, and began to react to them. They found very quickly that they were able to find savings in three different areas that ultimately they could pass on to their customers through lower prices.

One of them was that they were able to reduce the amount of time their folks would spend just firefighting the risks that would come up when they didn’t have information ahead of time. That saved about 20 percent on an annual basis.

They needed an independent third party doing it, and SAP and Ariba are a trusted source for doing that.

Second, they also found that they were able to reduce the amount of inventory obsolescence by almost 15 percent on an annual basis as a result of that.

And third, they found that they were avoiding shortages that historically cut their revenues by about 5 percent due to the fact that previously they couldn’t deliver on product that was demanded often on short notice. With the InfoNet all of these benefits were realized for them and became practical to achieve.

Their own perspective on this, relative to the second part of your question, was they couldn’t do this on their own and that no one else could. As they like to say, I certainly wouldn’t share my supply base with my competitor. The idea is that we can take those in aggregate, anonymize them, and make sure the information is cleansed in such a way that no one can know who the contributing folks are.

The fact that they ultimately have control of what people see and what they don’t allows them to have an environment where they feel like they can trust it and act on it, and ultimately, they can. As a result, they’re able to take advantage of that in a way that no one could on their own.

We’ve even had a few of the aerospace and defense folks who tried to build this on their own. All of them ultimately came back because they said they couldn’t get the benchmark data and the aggregate community data. They needed an independent third party doing it, and SAP and Ariba are a trusted source for doing that.

Gardner: For those folks here at Ariba LIVE who are familiar with one or other of these services and programs or maybe not using either one, how do they start? They’re saying, “This is a very compelling value in the supply chain, taking advantage of these big-data capabilities, recognizing that third party role that we can’t do on our own.” How do they get going on this?

Two paths

Charpie: There are two paths you can take. One of them is that you can certainly call us. We would be more than happy to sit down and go through this and look at what your opportunities are by examining your supply base with you.

Second, is to look at this a bit on your own and be reflective. We often take customers through a process, where sit down and look at supply risk and disruption they’ve have had in the past, and based on that, categorize those into the types of disruptions they’ve seen. What is based on quality? What is based on sub-tier issues? What is based on environmental things like natural disasters? Then, we group them.

Then we say, let’s reflect on if you had known these problems were going to happen, as Sundar said three, six, eight months ahead, could you have done something that would have impacted the business, saved money, driven more revenue, whatever the outcome may be?

If the answer to those questions is yes, then we’ll take those particular cases where the impact is understood and where an early warning system would have made a difference financially. We’ll analyze what that really looks like and what the data tells us. And if we can find a pattern within that data, then we know going in that you're going to be successful with the Network and with InfoNet before you ever start.

We would be more than happy to sit down and go through this and look at what your opportunities are by examining your supply base with you.

Gardner: This also strikes me as something that doesn’t fall necessarily into a traditional bucket, as to who would go after these services and gain value from them. That is to say, this goes beyond procurement and just operations, and it enters well into governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).

Who should be looking at this in a large organization or how many different types of groups or constituencies in a large organization should be thinking about this unique service?

Kamakshisundaram: We have found that it depends on the vertical and the industry. Typically, it all starts with the procurement, trying to understand, making sure they can assure supply, that they can get the right suppliers.

Very quickly, procurement also continues to work with supply chain. So you have procurement, supply chain, and depending on how the organization is set up, you also have finance involved, because you need all these three areas to come together.

This is one of the projects where you need complete collaboration and trust within the internal procurement organization, supply chain/operations organization, and finance organization.

As David mentioned, when we talk to aerospace, as well as automotive or even heavy industrial or machinery companies, some of these organizations already are working together. If you really think about how product development is done, procurement participates at the start of the black-box process, where they actually are part and parcel of the process. You also have finance involved.

Assurance of supply

To really understand and manage risk in your supply chain, especially for components that go into your end-level product, which makes up significant revenue for your organization, Supplier Management continues all the way through, even after you actually have assurance of supply.

The second type of customers we have worked with are in the business services/financial/insurance companies, where the whole notion around compliance and risk falls under a chief risk officer or under the risk management umbrella within the financial organization.

Again, here in this particular case, it's not just the finance organization that's responsible for predicting, monitoring, and managing risk. In fact, finance organizations work collaboratively with the procurement organization to understand who their key suppliers are, collect all the information required to accurately model and predict risk, so that they can execute and mitigate risk.

This is one of the projects where you need complete collaboration and trust within the internal procurement organization, supply chain/operations organization, and finance organization.

Gardner: It’s definitely a team sport within the origination, but a great deal of value comes when you do it properly in that fashion.

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about how improved visibility, analytics, and predictive responses are improving supply chain management. And we learned how the Supplier InfoNet coupled with the Ariba Network now allows for transparency and predictive analytics to reduce risk in many ways across multiple verticals in the supply chain arena.

So a big thanks to our guests, David Charpie, Vice President of Supplier InfoNet at SAP, and Sundar Kamakshisundaram, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Ariba, an SAP company. And also thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast, coming to you from the 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how companies can get a better handle on supply-chain risk using big data and community involvement. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Ariba's Product Roadmap for 2014 Points to Instant, Integrated and Data-Rich Business Cloud Services

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on what to expect in the near future from Ariba and from the Ariba/SAP synergy.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here the week of March 17 to explore the latest in collaborative commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping into the networked economy.

Gardner

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next interview examines the Ariba product roadmap for 2014 and beyond. We’ll now learn more about the recent news at Ariba LIVE and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP Cloud in the coming months.

To hear more about Ariba’s product and services roadmap, please join me in welcoming Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Haydon: Thanks, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: Before we get into the news, what’s changed in this business-network market and the community around it the past year? What are you hearing from customers? What’s shifted since we spoke last?

Haydon: At the baseline, there’s a lot more interest. People are just starting to really understand what business networks really mean.

Haydon

In some of the conversations coming through, large corporate enterprise buyers are really looking for a single hole through the firewall, if you like. They’ve done some great work in optimizing their internal business processes, but they really understand that the next undiscovered country is in collaborating with their suppliers.

But it’s not just their suppliers. It’s payment providers, logistics providers, and a whole heap of supply-chain stakeholders. We’re seeing that larger conversation over not just a single business process, but a holistic business-process view.

I think the other really interesting thing isn’t a trend. It's probably a confirmation of what we already knew, particularly in the southern hemisphere. Mobile is on the increase and is now bypassing of the laptop, specifically in some emerging markets.

They’re the two macro trends that we are seeing that are manifesting themselves in our new business acquisitions. 

Mingling with others

Gardner: So “mobile first” is really important, as is this notion of a boundaryless organization. You don’t just exist as an island. If you’re going to be really adept and productive and develop some of the great insights you can through data, you need to allow your borders to mingle with others.

Haydon: That’s right. And it’s a network effect as well. People don’t want to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They’re really starting to understand that there is the network here. I can adapt, not adopt, so to speak, and really accelerate the business by leveraging the existing community.

Gardner: What about technology? Have there been any technology shifts that we’ve had in the past year that have enabled some new and interesting things at the business networks and applications level?

Haydon: We’re in the early stages of redoing parts of our technology to take advantage of where the growing trend is going to come. We spoke about mobile, but it’s not just mobile. It's more about user experience and how we focus specific use cases on where an improved screen, an improved device, or both makes sense in the user context. That’s a really big change for us as well.

We’ve spent the last 12 months, and we will spend a good part of the next 12 months, rebuilding the platform to really be able to take advantage of these larger trends around real-time analytics, big data, and all that, but translating that into actual actionable use cases.

Gardner: What are the highlights for you at Ariba LIVE 2014?

We have some amazing customers, and the adoption of our customers is just superb for us.

Haydon: There are so many. First, there’s another record turnout. We have some amazing customers, and the adoption of our customers is just superb for us. We want to drive more value into both the buyers and the sellers.

There are some pretty interesting announcements that we’re doing. We announced AribaPay last year, and we are happy to announce this year that that’s well on track. We’re going to be doing more on AribaPay, but this is really transforming the B2B payment space and leveraging that. We want to bring the payment process within the visibility and the view of the network. We think that’s pretty huge.

Second, you’re going to hear about us doing more innovation than ever before. We have some significant investment from SAP, which will translate itself into globalization -- moving into Russia, moving into China -- and into new business processes, like supply chain and payment, as well as leveraging the great infrastructure and platform that SAP has in mobile. You’ll see three to five mobile-centric use cases delivered in Ariba within the next 12 months.

Gardner: What about the Ariba-SAP synergy? How has that changed Ariba. It’s been a while now since the merger and acquisition. What can you tell me about the relationship and the character of the company?

Embracing the cloud

Haydon: SAP has really embraced the cloud. And it has worked so well in terms of a lot of the cloud DNA that Ariba brings to the table. SAP has truly embraced that.

And for us within Ariba, there are three or four dimensions. One is certainly global, and SAP is everywhere. A global sales force and, more importantly, global know-how is very important.

Number two is industries. Historically, Ariba was not very industry focused. Now, with SAP, with their vast industry expertise, it really will enable us to drive great solutions into specific industries globally.

And last, but not least, it’s getting access, from a product-management perspective, to lots of new things to play with and great platform tools. We have HANA, and we have released some products on HANA starting this weekend.

We’ve seen some really great synergies in the first 12 months and we expect more next year.

We’re going to continue to do that. We’re going to put the network on HANA, accelerate that investment in mobile, other aspects on reporting, and deep integration with the business suite. We’ve seen some really great synergies in the first 12 months and we expect more next year.

Gardner: Let’s look at this whole spectrum of data and analysis. Data scientists and business intelligence (BI) professionals have been creating reports and developing the fruits of a data infrastructure for years, but what we are starting to see now is the use of analytics and visualizing the analytics.

We’re giving it to folks down on the line of business, not just at the very tip of the organization, but throughout the organization. How has this need and demand for greater data and greater analysis capabilities translated into what you’re doing at Ariba and SAP?

Haydon: This is actually part of why people understand the business network and why the business network is starting to take off. If you think about what’s so great about SAP/Ariba and our great capability, we have this great business network, more than 600 billion in spend, and more than a million suppliers.

I’ll go into technology for a second. It's the promise of what an in-memory database can give us. Imagine when we can put all of those transactions in real-time that are flowing today, imagine when we double it over the next three years or something like that.

Power of HANA

And we put that in real time because of the power of HANA, real-time analytics, whether it's lead time or a moving price average. We won’t just dish it up in quarterly reports that an executive sees. What if a supplier is responding to an order confirmation and they can see that the average lead time has changed? They can take an action and do something about it to fill their customer’s needs.

What if you’re a procurement officer and you’re going to do a sourcing event? You can see that five extra suppliers come on or there is some problem with your core supplier because they are out of stock. If there’s a natural disaster hitting, what if you can see that real-time?

That’s the promise that big data and analytics delivers in something like the business network, which gives us a holistic view that is unparalleled, particularly when we are able to marry that with the master data that exists in the applications or in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Gardner: What strikes me, Chris, about this era is that for so long, companies relied on their own data and their own analysis. There was really a wall around the activity with BI.

But now, with things like third-party networks, like the Ariba Network, they can start to get data that might be anonymized. Privacy issues have been worked out and people are allowing data to be shared. That’s where these real insights are coming. It’s the volume, velocity, and variability of the type of information.

None of this happens without the appropriate privacy, anonymization, aggregation, and all of that.

So what comes in terms of a business application benefit? Where are you driving these visualizations and this data? What can we expect in the next 12-18 months in terms of analytics meeting business applications?

Haydon: The first one, which we have already announced, is Supplier InfoNet, which is our HANA-based alerting and supplier information system, which can also feed in. We’re  releasing that and we’ll be building that integration into our solution set. That’s the first thing.

We’re kind of feeling our way here, and you brought up an excellent point. None of this happens without the appropriate privacy, anonymization, aggregation, and all of that. That’s the given that you have got to work out first.

But once you have that, we want to look at point areas to road test what it looks like. Maybe we just show to a supplier and say, “When you’re responding to an event, your lead time is x percent slower than all your other competitors.” There’s some peer pressure, and we’re not sharing anything else, but it actually helps the salesperson understand where they are.

It’s the same thing on the buy side. If you confirm that the moving average price of this commodity in the United States moved by 5 percent, you might want to consider having a sourcing event. Those are the type of point things.

Most meaningful

The holistic dashboarding and automated alerts will come. We just want to work out those flows and what’s most meaningful. That’s where we go back to the point about the user experience. How do we do that? Do we need to expose that in a mobile app with an alert, or is that just an icon that pops up on your screen, or both. That’s how we want to intersect the two.

Gardner: Let’s move into mobile. You mentioned "mobile first." That’s really an interesting concept, but it seems to me that it's more than just a screen definition. You really need to rethink processes when you start to go to that mobile tier and recognize that people are 24x7, regardless of location, intersecting and  interacting with business processes. So what should we expect from mobile innovation?

Haydon: I wouldn’t even couch it as “mobile first,” but “mobile as required.” First and foremost, what we are focusing on for our mobile strategy is, notwithstanding putting in place, just the core platform to enable it. When we’re looking to our features that we build in our products, we want to focus, which, as you were alluding to, is how does the end user need to consume this information?

If it does make sense that a mobile device is able to present that, then we’ll do it. We are not doing it for the sake of having a mobile solution, just to have it out there. We don’t need to do that.

We want to take a focused approach. We want to embed the mobile development paradigm within our current development product teams.

Obviously, some things bubble to the top, approval apps or flipping a purchase order or a new event, and we will do those. But we want to be quite systematic in what we’re going to do.

Also, from a product development sense, we want to take a focused approach. We want to embed the mobile development paradigm within our current development product teams.

What does that mean? It means we’re not going to have a mobile team out on the left, running and building 500-600 apps that they think they should build, and then our core feature team doing it. We’re going to have our engineers, our product managers, our quality assurance (QA) people thinking about mobile in parallel with the screen and how that enhances the customers or the user experience to deliver the business outcome.

While we might be somewhat slow compared to others, some competitors are saying they have 20 mobile apps. We think our way is going to deliver better business outcomes by taking the user experience construct and making that, whether that’s mobile, analytics, or screen, all in the same context.

Gardner: I like the idea that it's process first, regardless of the screen, but this seems to give you an opportunity to move and scale into new regions in some markets. In China, for example, the smartphone is the primary device and screen.

It also allows you to scale down smaller businesses. You can run a business on a smartphone. Why not have cloud business services to accomplish that? What about that global reach? What do you expect for the next 12-18 months in terms of expansion vis-à-vis any number of services, but mobile being part of that?

New data centers

Haydon: A couple of things. Number one, since we first spoke, we announced our first European data center, and that was commissioned in December. We already have a number of customers live already. We’re in the process of dealing with that. 

We have also announced data centers in China and Russia for our applications. So in terms of just global deployment, we’re investing in data centers which will deal with a lot of the data privacy and encryption table stakes to even get started.

And then, just being on the back of SAP is one of the really great synergies that we get, in that they have in-country local product managers who are born and bred and live in the jurisdiction to be our proxy customers, the voice of the customer actually in-country as we look to embed in there. 

Gardner: Into our next subject. What about governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) topics and issues. It seems that we can’t really divorce concerns about privacy and security and risk amelioration from business activities, especially as we consider that boundaryless organization. We want to expand into new markets and allow enterprises to do more business and supplier activities across these boundaries.

All decisions -- procurement, supply chain or others -- are made with a risk-management focus.

So how do we think about embedding GRC both as a process and as a technology in the Ariba roadmap?

Haydon: Ariba had a pretty good legacy of being at the forefront on a lot of that. Maybe we didn’t give ourselves credit, but for the longest time, we have had security, privacy, availability, and confidentiality processes and certifications. Some competitors have one, some competitors have two or three, but we had five.

We are also payment card industry (PCI) compliant. That’s a pretty high threshold. I know other companies have PCI compliance, but I mention those points because that’s part of our DNA. You have to start thinking about that, you have to understand enterprise problems and build your operations, your infrastructure, and your technology around that. We’re in a pretty good state.

Obviously, these GRC compliance processes are growing. Risk management is like a new mantra. It's the forefront of anything else.

I mentioned our data centers. One aspect of dealing with in-country data privacy, obviously, is having a data center in a jurisdiction. As I said, we commissioned our European data center. One in Germany is primary, and there is a failover elsewhere. That should deal with a lot of EU data-privacy concerns. Then, Russia, China, and so on.

The second piece that we do have, being as part of SAP, is that SAP has a very comprehensive GRC process themselves to make sure that they don’t do business with customers that are on particular restrictions or watch lists internationally. It's not just the US or the EU, as I understand. SAP reviews 13 or 14 data sources, not just one or two.

Trading partners

So we’re bringing those processes into the Ariba Network to make sure that we don’t do that, but we also notify our trading partners as well, and that’s part of the value-added service. You may well be doing transactions or trying to do an event with someone not appropriate from a risk perspective.

The last piece, a little bit related to this from the roadmap, is that, in the course of this year, we’re looking to build out on the Ariba Network support for US public sector. Once you start into the public sector for business process transactions, you get a whole heap of compliance issues on encryption, accessibility, and a couple of other dimensions. Those requirements will be built into the network and also to our applications over the next 12 and 24 months.

Gardner: Now, back to products and services. Often, at these Ariba events, and I’ve been at quite a few, we hear about services that people are familiar with, but there are layers of new functionality and features. Are there any that pop out in your mind from 2014 that we should go over and s reflect on as maybe changing the way people think about doing business vis-à-vis cloud and vis-à-vis the networked economy?

We said we’re going to do a lot of innovation. We’re going to deliver on that innovation.

Haydon: Yeah, there are a couple. One is something released in Quarter 4, at least for our SAP clients. We have native connectivity between the SAP Business Suite and the Ariba Network. You don’t need middleware. It's a downloaded extension pack.

It's pretty game-changing, when you can download something and an order can go out of the Business Suite straight to the network natively. Let’s just remind people of that. That’s pretty nice.

Number two, we have a lot of new features and products coming out, as we said. We said we’re going to do a lot of innovation. We’re going to deliver on that innovation. I’d like to quickly talk about four.

AribaPay, which we touched on, is changing the role of B2B payments on the payment side.

At the top end of the funnel, we are also launching Spot Quote. This is pretty interesting. Forty percent of procurement activity is on contract or on catalog. In some industries, it's greater. This Spot Quote process enables us to take these tactical three bids in a buy from a buyer programmatically and put that out into the business network to be bid upon, and we can also identify new suppliers.

What's exciting about that is lot of process efficiency for buyers, but also for a seller. Think about this. It's almost like the budgets are already largely being committed, and they have a close date. It almost drops to the bottom of the pipeline. That’s pretty nice. It might not be the biggest deal, but I’ll take it.

Supply chain

We’re also releasing our first version of the supply chain, focusing primarily on retail use-case scenarios, working very hard with SAP to have end-to-end connectivity, and we are very excited about that.

Last, but not least, services on the network as well, extending a whole new type of collaborative services for estimate-based services, are going live.

So we have more innovation. It's supporting both buyers and suppliers, and going globally, in terms of Russia and China, and we’ll be adding Brazil and Mexico invoicing as well. So there are a lot of exciting things on the business network for customers, not only in the USA, but globally.

We’re also releasing our first version of the supply chain, focusing primarily on retail use-case scenarios.

Gardner: Well, great. I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about the news here at Ariba LIVE and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP in the coming months.

And we have learned the latest in the way Ariba and SAP are working together helps innovative companies thrive in the networked economy as they look to be more data-driven, exploit mobile tier processes, and of course keep their data and business safe.

So a big thanks to our guest, Chris Haydon, Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance, and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. Thanks, sir.

Haydon: Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on what to expect in the near future from Ariba and from the Ariba/SAP synergy. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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