Accenture builds on its SAP expertise and launches the supply chain nerve center

The HFS OneEcosystem™ for supply chains propagates a vision where deep partnerships are forged within the service provider and technology vendor ecosystem to eliminate longstanding industry challenges. Accenture recently announced the supply chain nerve center in partnership with SAP to achieve the much-needed yet complex integration among various supply chain functions and stakeholders, leading to a low-touch collaborative supply chain.

Accenture has been one of SAP’s top strategic partners for 40 years. It has 15,000 SAP supply chain experts (of 85,000 SAP practitioners) and 50 delivery centers worldwide. This partnership is driven by a strategic alignment and shared vision for helping the future of enterprise technology with innovative solutions and services. Accenture, via the nerve center, has expanded this partnership.

The nerve center integrates multiple SAP and third-party systems to connect end-to-end supply chains and make clients’ supply chains more intelligent, responsive, and risk-resilient.

Enterprises are grappling with the longstanding problem of curtailed supply chain visibility

SAP claims that about 90% of Forbes Global 2000 companies use SAP-owned software and services, such as SAP integrated business planning (IBP), to run supply chain processes. In a utopian world, a successful and fully integrated business plan improves the bottom line, cash flow, customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and partner experience (PX). However, enterprises are far from this miraculous integration.

During HFS’ discussion with some Forbes Global 2000 chemical manufacturing companies, supply chain executives highlighted that they have annual contracts with multiple customers to supply required volumes of specific chemicals in given timeframes. They do not have visibility into the total obligated contract volume of those chemicals to supply to the contracted customer.

Customer fulfillment can be a challenge in a partially integrated supply chain

Manufacturers often get into situations where fulfilling sudden demand from non-contracted customers means they can’t meet demand from their contracted customers. Current supply chain systems don’t have enough built-in provisions to base supply decisions on a priority mechanism. Even if they have, the siloed and linear supply chain ensures these mechanisms are ineffective, leading to precarious situations.

Similarly, when supply chain experts do not have visibility of new products and their projected raw materials, especially renewed ones, the supply chain leadership is in deep trouble managing the existing inventory and sourcing new raw materials. Automation is possible only when you integrate contracts, inventory, and service level agreement (SLA) management. Currently, these complexities are engineered and evaluated with human intelligence and experience with limited technology usage.

Therefore, most large enterprises need more visibility into demand, product delivery, material sourcing, manufacturing, and supplier management.

The Accenture supply chain nerve center plays the orchestrator role for enhanced visibility

The nerve center in Exhibit 1 orchestrates across functions, provides proactive and reactive responses across the supply chain, enhances stakeholder visibility, and mitigates real-time risks.

Exhibit 1: Accenture’s supply chain nerve center is based on a composable architecture integrating various SAP solutions and supply chain stakeholders

Source: Accenture, December 2023

The nerve center is developed on the SAP business technology platform (BTP), enabling it to connect with other SAP digital supply chain (DSC) solutions or even limited third-party solutions like CosmoTech and Interos to complement SAP’s capabilities. It is built to solve strategic business needs to detect threats, plan mitigation, execute corrective actions, and optimize operations.

Accenture’s supply chain nerve center creates significant differences in large enterprises’ supply chain processes. Enterprises can align the digital agenda, design minimum viable products, and implement use cases to realize the best outcome. Based on the outcome, they can decide to scale up the supply chain process in different modules or regions.

Nerve center implementations have helped enterprises in their supply chain processes

Accenture has implemented multiple SAP solutions at a high-tech company, and the nerve center is at the intersection of design, procurement, sourcing, and production by creating n-tier visibility and collaboration across the supply chain. It has also built a showcase demo with an enterprise digital twin on SAP BTP, consisting of a functional health dashboard supported by data from SAP DSC solutions.

It enables “double click” functionality to take further actions. It also provides a GenAI-enabled chatbot for data gathering, analysis, and decision making. With this use case, a company could fulfill priority products and effective demand and supply matching with superior control over materials.

Exhibit 2: Accenture has set ambitious expansion plans for its supply chain nerve center

Source: HFS Research, 2024

The Bottom Line: Large enterprises that have deeply invested in the SAP ecosystem can leverage Accenture’s nerve center to make significant progress in making their supply chains low-touch and collaborative.

Accenture currently takes a hybrid agile approach toward implementing identified use cases at enterprises with SAP S/4 environments, creating visibility, more intelligence, responsiveness, and risk resilience in several areas of the supply chain.

It will still take some time for the nerve center to evolve and promise end-to-end supply chain visibility with predictive alerts, scenario analysis, intelligent collaboration, and autonomous execution.