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SAP Business Network for Supply Chain
Discover the Latest in SAP Business Network for Supply Chain: 2025 Q1 Update. Dive into our newest blog post, "What’s New in SAP Business Network for Supply Chain" for 2025. This article focuses on the exciting features introduced in the 2025 Q1 Release. It's tailored for those looking for an in-depth look at the improvements launched in early 2025 for SAP Business Network for Supply Chain. Below, you'll find a summary of the updates expected to enhance our customers' experience.
1. Streamlining Compliance with Quality Inspection Certificates in ASN Uploads
In today’s supply chain landscape, ensuring product quality and compliance is more critical than ever — especially as companies work to meet sustainability goals, regulatory standards, and industry-specific requirements. For suppliers managing quality-controlled materials and buyers ordering such materials, we’ve introduced two new features that simplify the process of handling quality certificates:
- Mass Upload for Quality Documents: In addition to adding quality certificates during ASN creation, suppliers can now upload quality certificates during the ASN mass upload at the line-item level. This functionality reduces manual effort, improves data accuracy, and allows for faster processing by enabling bulk certificate uploads.
- Buyer Control to Mandate Required Documents: On the buyer side, organizations can specify exactly which quality certifications are needed for each purchase order. This empowers buyers to ensure that only the required certificates are mandatory, helping to streamline the procurement process and enforce compliance standards.
By simplifying these two processes, businesses can more effectively track critical certifications, such as:
- Sustainability credentials and carbon footprint documentation
- Compliance with environmental or safety regulations
- Industry-specific certifications ensuring product integrity and regulatory adherence.
Key Benefits:
- Improved Compliance: Reduces the risk of missing important certificates, supporting regulatory, sustainability, and industry-specific requirements.
- Enhanced Process Adoption: Encourages smoother adoption of internal processes for ship notices and quality certificates across the supply chain.
- Improved Traceability: Ensures certificates are only mandatory if specified in the PO, improving traceability and reducing the need for updates before goods receipt generation.
This feature not only simplifies supplier collaboration but also empowers organizations to maintain stronger oversight and meet their broader environmental, compliance, and quality assurance goals with greater confidence.
2. Batch-managed Material Validation in ASN Creation
Ensuring the accuracy of batch information is crucial for compliance and traceability, especially for certain industries with batch-managed products. To support this, we’ve introduced two key enhancements that improve data integrity for batch-managed materials.
- Mandatory Supplier Batch ID: The Supplier Batch ID field can now be marked as mandatory based on a flag in the purchase order item.
- Improved Validation for Production and Expiry Dates: Enhanced validation checks for production and expiry dates ensure accuracy when handling batch-managed materials.
Historically, while SAP Business Network supported batch information in various transactions, there was no mechanism in place to ensure mandatory batch entry during ASN creation. This update addresses that gap, making batch information mandatory where required, ensuring better traceability and reducing the need for updates before goods receipt generation.
These enhancements offer greater control over batch-managed materials, ensuring that suppliers provide the required information and buyers can maintain full traceability and data integrity across their supply chain.
3. Qualtrics Survey: Enhancing Feedback Collection for Continuous Improvement
To better understand user needs and improve our platform, we've expanded on a previous feature to make providing feedback easier and more accessible. Supplier users can now share their thoughts during the Purchase Order, Order Confirmation, and Ship Notice creation processes through a Qualtrics survey.
The feedback process is streamlined in two ways:
- A side tab allows users to voluntarily click and provide input. Once clicked, a pop-up prompts users to share their thoughts.
- We’ve introduced a push survey mechanism, which randomly prompts users to provide feedback at time-spaced intervals, without requiring them to click on the feedback tab. This makes it easier to offer input without disrupting the user's workflow.
This feedback is optional, and users also have the option to sign up for additional research sessions to provide more detailed input to our UX and Product Management teams.
4. Ensuring Accurate Serial Number Validation in Component Consumption
To improve material traceability and reduce errors in subcontracting processes, we’ve introduced a feature that allows buyers to require contract manufacturers to select serial numbers directly from their component inventory during component consumption. This ensures that contract manufacturers can only select serial numbers that are available, ensuring only valid components are used. This is particularly critical in certain industries like life sciences, where precise traceability is essential to prevent costly product recalls.
The feature is composed of two parts:
- New Transaction Rule for Serial Number Validation: Buyers can enable a transaction rule that ensures contract manufacturers select only serial numbers from available inventory.
- Enhanced UI for Serial Number Selection: In the UI, suppliers can select serial numbers from the Consumed Component Serial Number pop-up, with an “Autofill Serial Number” feature to speed up the process.
The validation is also supported in B2B and Excel upload scenarios.
Key Benefits:
- Improved Traceability: Ensures only valid serial numbers are used, preventing mistakes and enhancing traceability and compliance and ensuring accurate inventory tracking.
- Enhanced Control for Buyers: Buyers can enforce serial number validation to maintain control over material consumption and ensure compliance.
- Improved Parent-Child Material Traceability: The system’s handling of the parent-child relationship ensures proper linking of serial numbers, ensuring accurate tracking for related components.
5. Efficient Management of ASN and Handling Unit (Packaging Materials) Number Ranges
Managing ASN and Handling Unit Number ranges can be cumbersome, especially when dealing with a large supplier base. For customers who need to create number ranges for individual suppliers, this can result in a long list of entries that are difficult to navigate — particularly when a customer has hundreds or thousands of suppliers. Additionally, pagination can make it harder to find specific entries, requiring users to click through multiple pages.
To address this, we’ve introduced a feature that enhances the management of number ranges by enabling faster searches based on two new parameters: Supplier Name and Network ID. This streamlines the process for businesses that need to manage many number range configurations.
Key Benefits:
- Faster Search and Enhanced Navigation: Enables faster access to specific number range configurations and reduces the need to click through multiple pages.
- Improved Management of Supplier Relationships: Ideal for businesses that require unique number ranges for each supplier, making it easier to manage and maintain complex setups.
This new feature makes managing ASN and Handling Unit Number ranges more efficient, saving time and improving usability for customers handling large numbers of supplier configurations.
6. Expanded Custom Attributes for Enhanced Planning Collaboration
Every industry has unique and specific planning criteria, and to support this, we’ve increased the number of customer-defined attributes for planning records to 60 for both buyers and suppliers. This enhancement offers greater flexibility to capture the data that matters most to your business, enabling more tailored and detailed planning collaboration.
The Excel upload/download feature also supports up to 30 additional columns for custom attributes, requiring the latest versions of Excel for compatibility.
Key Benefits:
- More Flexibility: Capture up to 60 custom attributes and 30 additional Excel columns to meet industry-specific planning needs.
- Better Collaboration: Share and manage more relevant, detailed data between buyers and suppliers.
7. Improved Planning and Order Tracking with New Key Figures and Flexibility for Supplier Part ID
To help buyers and suppliers stay on top of their order quantities, we’ve introduced two new key figures: Open Order and Open Replenishment Order. These key figures show the net quantity of orders that have yet to be received within a specific time period. This is calculated by subtracting the total quantity of goods receipts from the total quantity of orders with a requested delivery date.
The new key figures allow buyers and suppliers to easily see what is still pending, improving visibility and planning.
Key Benefits:
- Quick Overview: Gives a clear view of remaining orders that still need to be received based on the original order quantity and what has already been delivered.
- Better Planning: These key figures can be used in other calculations, like Projected Stock, to improve decision-making for both buyers and suppliers.
Additionally, we’ve introduced a new setting that enables purchase orders to be matched using only Buyer Part IDs and Plant IDs, ignoring Supplier Part IDs. This is useful for organizations where Supplier Part IDs frequently change or are not immediately available, ensuring more flexible and reliable transaction matching and ultimately a smoother planning process.
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SAP Business Network for Procurement and SAP Business Network for Supply Chain
