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JohnMcDonnell
Advisor
Advisor

As trends from our day-to-day life as consumers continue to creep into the business world, buyers of products are demanding a better and simpler shopping experience.  Even before the economic downturn, everyone was looking for smarter ways to run their business. But in today’s “new normal,” it’s an imperative.  With an eye on revenue and bottom-line process optimization, distributors are migrating to enabling technologies such as cloud computing, e-commerce, and social media to reach beyond the four walls of the company and drive costs out of their business processes while growing revenue.  The ability to connect and collaborate electronically is paramount to top-and bottom-line success in today’s fast-paced, global business environment.

SAP realizes that to fully achieve the vision of better commerce, a many-to-many, network-centric approach is required: to eliminate the point-to-point connections and disconnected processes, to improve the user experience and reduce the missed business opportunities associated with one-to-many collaboration.  The Ariba Network is the world's largest trading community like this with more than 800,000 connected companies collaborating on more than $400 billion of commerce.  They have been on the forefront of this business transformation with a world-class network that facilitates the collaboration between suppliers and their customers.  Using the network, businesses of all sizes can connect to their trading partners anywhere.  SAP recently acquired Ariba to continue to innovate and grow the business network for our customers.

By linking with buyers on the Ariba Network, distributors enable their customers to quickly and easily find the items they need and purchase them in compliance with corporate contracts and processes while differentiating themselves from their competitors. It is a opportunity to redefine the buyer and supplier relationship and enjoy substantial cost savings in the process.  The distribution companies that embrace e-procurement and business networks by integrating systems and business processes across traditional boundaries are quickly realizing great benefits.  They look at it as another channel to help grow their business.

Leading distribution companies have been using the Ariba Network to become proactive rather than reactive in their marketing approach and showcase their entire range of products and services to more customers and expand their reach and traction within large, national, multi-site customer accounts with e-procurement platforms. If you are using the Ariba Network to receive purchase orders and send invoices to your customer base today, you are likely already enjoying the benefits of greater productivity and cost efficiencies. The Network is proving to be a unique and profitable sales channel and provides a way to make business commerce as easy as consumer commerce.

For more information on the Ariba Network and the value it can deliver to your company, visit http://www.ariba.com/supplier/suppliernetwork/.

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