SAP C-business scenarios
Cay Rademann
C-business is collaborative business, in which various business entities, using technology available from SAP, develop their business strategies and tactics in concert. This tip is excerpted from the January, February March 2001 issue of
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SAP Insider. It's no secret that the Internet offers great opportunities for improved communications and integration of very different enterprises, an opportunity for collaboration of business partners that promises higher value for both the partners themselves and their customers. But how do you begin to implement such a collaboration? SAP gives you a place to start with templates for these partnerships: Collaborative Business Scenarios.
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SAP has developed more than 80 scenarios for various industries, and makes them available at www.sap.com/c-bs.
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After you select the business partner you want to collaborate with, integrating your business processes involves three steps:
- First, you and your business partner have to agree on how you want to collaborate, i.e. the process flow.
- Second, you must address how you want to integrate your processes.
- Finally, each partner has to implement parts of the scenario on its own systems.
Presented here is a tip on process flow negotiation. Look for details on steps two and three in upcoming searchSAP.com Web-enablement tips.
Step 1: Negotiating the process flow
Once you have selected a business partner for collaborating, the project will start with negotiations to define the exact process flow of the business scenario. At this stage, you and your partner determine which activities are involved in the scenario, which partner has to perform each activity, and in which sequence the activities will be executed.
This includes both the "business as usual" scenario flow and the inevitable exceptions. For example, if your business partner is a supplier, it is possible that, due to stock shortages, your partner can deliver only a partial order. Will you accept this, or will the entire order be cancelled? Both you and your partner also need to define service levels for each activity (e.g. How much time does the partner have to confirm or neglect an order?) and specify what will happen if a service level is not met (e.g. Will the partner have to pay a penalty, or will the whole order be cancelled?).
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Related Book
Inter-organizational Cooperations With Sap Systems
Author : P. Buxmann and W. Kuenig
Publisher : Springer-Verlag
ISBN/CODE : 3540669833
Cover Type : Hard Cover
Pages : 200
Published : Oct 2000
Summary :
Inter-organizational cooperation has become increasingly important in firms' strategies. This book provides a brief introduction to the theory of cooperation and the foundations of logistics, service management, and supply chain management. The main focus of the book, however, is to examine the use of SAP systems for supporting inter-organizational cooperation (in particular supply chain coordination). The authors present both well-known logistics solutions, e. g. EDI, and the implementations of state-of-the-art supply chain solutions using SAP systems such as mySAP.com, SAP APO, SAP LES, SAP BBP, SAP Business Information Warehouse, and Internet Applications. In particular, the book contains a number of case studies which show the application of the systems in practice.
This was first published in March 2001