This week GXS participated in SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer event. We debuted GXS Trading Grid for SAP (with official endorsement from SAP with SAP NetWeaver Certification). Our investments in SAP started accelerating about a year ago almost entirely at the request (actually the imploring) of many of our enterprise customers.

I was not certain what to expect from this event. Every year we build a marketing plan that spans events and tradeshows worldwide, primarily driven by geography (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, China, Australia, Korea and so on), by industries (retail, consumer goods, high-tech, automotive, financial services) and alongside our partners (Microsoft, Verizon, and many others)

Often when we attend an event for the first time, the return on investment is never easy to predict (after all tradeshows are really less about new lead generation than visibility and awareness). In such situations, we typically formulate a quick survey to at least get a good handle on the attendee’s state of mind and top issues. SAPPHIRE was no exception. Of course, with an appealing giveaway – GPS Navigator this time.

What we learned was shocking.
- 95% indicated that they trade electronically with less than 50% of their customers.
- A shocking 54% trade electronically with less than 10% of the their customers.
- An equally shocking 61% indicated that they trade electronically with less than 10% of their suppliers.
- Over 1/3 were involved in a major SAP upgrade and were concerned that the upgrade is negatively impacting their supply chain.

As I think back about the event, I had several reoccurring observations that somehow seem validated by the survey results. The event seemed highly internal enterprise focused, even when it came to supply chain management and supplier relationship management. How effective can a supply chain management system be if it does not have the information about what’s going on in the supply chain flowing into it? With the exception of the largest system integrators, every SAP consultant I met with really did not have a good practice for advising customers on supply chain automation or trading partner enablement or business-to-business process optimization in general. Too often I heard that customers have help desks that handle the supply chain enablement and automation!

Summing up the parts, customers have made substantial investments and commitments to their ERP technology. That was obvious based solely on so many senior executives from very large companies in attendance. All are thinking about improving the return on these investments but rarely has the thinking really extended outside of an enterprise’s four walls for competitive advantage. Of course, this brings a whole new world of complexity, loss of control and diversity of technical challenges. With so many customers stuck on the upgrade treadmill, finding available resources is probably a big culprit.

But, at some point, a distributor or retailer, for example, is going to need accurate, up-to-date information flowing into their warehouse management system. Advanced Ship Notice (ASN) processes, for instance, should be 100% automated with compliance rules that ensure smooth flow into any system. Or, event signals throughout the supply chain providing real-time track and trace to a transportation management system.

Only with deliberate automation that truly extends outside of the four walls of an enterprise (and I don’t mean via yet another portal) can an enterprise truly feed their hungry ERP system what it wants… clean, accurate, timely data and lots of it. As evidenced by our customers pushing us to SAP SAPPHIRE, those days are finally here.