Today’s ever-changing and dynamic business world necessitates the alignment between an enterprise, its suppliers, and the myriad processes and capabilities that are required to effectively manage corporate spend. The overarching need to maintain visibility, that of the “360-degree kind,” is transforming the way the typical business views the inter-connectivity of its network of suppliers, partners, and customers.

Last week in San Francisco, global travel, expense, and invoice automation solution Concur hosted its annual Fusion conference, the largest of its kind focused on these industries. This year’s event had an obvious buzz around it, as Concur was acquired last fall by SAP in a move that certainly sent shock waves throughout the business world.

“We are the biggest single bet that SAP has ever made,” said Steve Singh, CEO of Concur during the first day’s keynote address, adding that, with fellow SAP-branded solutions Ariba and Fieldglass (which were acquired a little over a year ago for nearly $1 billion), there is an opportunity for these “pioneers and market leaders” to transform the modern organization.

In past years, Fusion was an event that focused on (and evangelized) the importance of managing a complex spend category that was not only rising in spending per year, but also in strategic value. Indeed, business travel and its associated expenses are part of the growing realm of “complex spend management.” However, this year’s Fusion utilized the discussion of the category (along with Concur’s fastest-growing product: its invoice management tool) as more of a support beam for something much, much larger…and much more evolutionary.

It’s no secret that the major question going into Fusion was just how Concur would fit into the SAP umbrella, and Singh addressed this notion during his keynote as thinking about the solution as one of three major parts of the “SAP Business Network,” completing the trifecta along with Ariba and Fieldglass. Singh laid out an interesting example of how this union, in a perfect world, would work:

• Automated sensors within a company tool or machine (Singh used an airplane as an example) alert the network to which components / parts need repair.
• The Ariba network purchases the parts, at which point…
• …the linked system notifies a contingent or freelance repair team (via Fieldglass), with…
• …all travel and expenses booked, managed, and reconciled by Concur.

“The networks must be connected, effortless, and transparent,” said Singh when speaking about the possibilities of the SAP Business Network. Even as business networks continue to transform how companies manage commerce, there has always been a “gap” in various areas of need across the organization. Automation of procure-to-pay processes (purchasing, invoice-processing, approval workflow, payment, etc.) is certainly a relative boon, however, the bridge to the future is one that is built with touchless and effortless capabilities that solve problems outside of spend and supplier management while also linking back to the procurement and finance functions for visibility and intelligence purposes.

“These networks can and will be so deep that they are connected to the ecosystems of partners that provide value,” said Singh. “The real incredible power here is when these networks “talk” to each automatically. That’s the future that we are creating.”

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