The demand for product quality, personalisation and transparency of the supply chain is increasing heavily.
According to a PwC research study, “customers behaviours and expectations are changing dramatically, challenging the established supply chain and operations setups of leading industrial companies”.
Supply chains are also facing major disruption factors such as changing and extreme weather conditions, global health crises and supply shortages. And it’s crucial that the response to these factors are similarly extreme.
On the other hand, digital technologies have a huge impact on every aspect of how companies run their businesses and represent a tremendous opportunity to facilitate integrated processes with partners, improve visibility of the sourcing process and leverage big data to predict and simulate business scenarios – all with clear benefit for gross margins.
The value of linking direct spend sourcing with design, manufacturing, and planning processes to build an intelligent digital supply chain focusing on greater collaboration with trading partners has never been more important.
The benefits that Digital Champions gain from a digitalised supply chain are transparency, real-time data sharing, extended collaboration, immediate responsiveness and flexibility, and connectivity. And this is not just a business or technical advantage. It is the ability to excel at managing and integrating four critical ecosystems: Customer Solutions, Operations, Technology, People.
Through automation and greater alignment with trading partners, SAP Ariba Cloud solutions support a more efficient and effective approach to direct spend management covering all the processes from Source & Contract to Pay & Invoice.
Typical supply chain challenges for leading companies are not only linked to the specific function but have a big impact across all the organisation departments, especially when it comes to direct spend management. Supply Chain and the related IT systems are the most affected areas; however, overall company revenue growth as well as risk management also need to be considered.
PwC’s strategy-through-execution approach incorporates elements of strategy, industry, process, tax, and IT knowledge and can help organisations to identify and influence the high impact levers of change within their source-to-pay function.
Our approach goes beyond technical implementation and it's fully integrated with the PwC framework for Digital Procurement Integrated Solution (DPIS).
The DPIS is a framework based on four key solution dimensions: Applications, D2P-Solutions, Enabling Technologies and Business Solutions.
Full ‘end-to-end’ industry solutions are at the core of the DPIS solution landscape.
Dinesh Purushothaman
Director, Technology Consulting, Supply Chain Management, PwC Switzerland
Tel: +41 58 792 55 02
Marc Rajal
Director, Advisory Supply Chain & Operations, PwC Switzerland
Tel: +41 58 792 43 25