Anyone who believes Microsoft is introducing something new with its recently announced Supplier Engagement functionality has not seen how mature multi-enterprise supply chain collaboration platforms already dominate the market.
Over the past few months, I have been examining this market and what these platforms already offer international organizations.
Supplier collaboration goes far beyond a supplier portal for purchase orders, RFQs and invoices. It is about collaboration across the full breadth of the supply chain: from development, sourcing and planning to production, quality, compliance, logistics and transactions.
If you are looking to fundamentally strengthen your collaboration with suppliers, take a look at:
🌐 The major networks & ERP backbones
• Infor Nexus: A global multi-enterprise network with tens of thousands of connected parties, bringing together supply chain collaboration, logistics and supply chain finance.
• SAP Business Network: From supplier discovery and sourcing to transactions and supplier collaboration, built around a global B2B network.
🏷️ The sector specialists
• TradeBeyond: Brings sourcing, supply chain sustainability and PLM together in a multi-enterprise network that helps brands and retailers bring products to market faster and with greater compliance.
• Bamboo Rose: A collaborative platform for retail and consumer goods that fully digitizes the lifecycle of procurement, product development, global sourcing and supply chain execution.
⚙️ The operational & manufacturing specialists
• Winddle (Retail & Consumer Goods): Winddle connects retailers, suppliers, factories and logistics partners and supports collaboration from planning and tracking through order management, supplier communication and document management. Winddle has been used by RougeGorge since 2016 and was recently selected by Ysé.
• Jakamo (Tech & Discrete Manufacturing): Founded in 2012 after its founders identified a very concrete problem: the manufacturing industry lacked an independent, user-friendly platform for collaboration between companies. Today, more than 3,000 companies in over 50 countries use the platform.
• Valuechain (Aerospace, Automotive & Heavy Manufacturing): Connects complete multi-tier supply networks for performance, quality, compliance and ESG, reaching well beyond the Tier-1 relationship.
• TADA (Complex Discrete Manufacturing & CPG): Orchestrates complete supplier ecosystems by connecting data across planning, execution and supplier operations in real time.
This is the market Microsoft is now trying to gain a foothold in with Supplier Engagement.
Looking beyond your own ERP ecosystem, you can see that supply chains have long been orchestrated across multiple tiers, domains and parties. That is where the real maturity of supplier collaboration lies.
So before selecting a new supplier collaboration solution, take a look at what already exists outside your own ERP ecosystem.