xSuite Group develops new business partner portal for procurement with SAP

When it comes to the cloud, SAP is not holding back on its strategy: customers, especially those with the new S/4 Hana product generation, are to shift their activities to the cloud as quickly and comprehensively as possible. For the development of extensions and in-house programming, the Group provides its SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), which therefore has particular strategic importance for the company.

In order to fill the concept with life, partners and user companies are needed to follow suit. Thus, xSuite Group, which for its part is increasingly offering products from the cloud, has also developed its latest new development, the "xSuite Business Partner Portal Sphere", completely for the SCP. This ensures compatibility with current and future SAP releases.

With its new development, xSuite offers purchasing departments in SAP user companies a central platform for the automated and standardized exchange of data and documents in their respective Procure-2-Pay process with suppliers. Purchasing, accounting, and suppliers can use the portal to perform all procurement-related work steps digitally. Access takes place for those involved via the web browser. The target group is companies with SAP ERP or SAP S/4 Hana in use.

The portal solution runs on the SCP and uses the SAP Cloud Connector - xSuite has already passed an SAP readiness check for this, and voluntary SAP certification is also planned.

For Managing Director Matthias Lemenkühler, the advantages are obvious:

"SAP regularly releases new updates for the cloud variants of S/4 Hana, either once a year or once a quarter, depending on the version. Solutions that are explicitly developed for the SAP Cloud Platform relieve user companies of the task of checking with each release, with each update, whether everything is still running correctly - a far too great effort that is eliminated here."

Entire procure-to-pay process is moved to the portal

With the new business partner portal, purchasing continues to work in its SAP environment. The purchase order is generated in SAP as usual and automatically made available to the supplier in the portal so that it is immediately available. Subsequently, the supplier can generate all subsequent documents from the purchase order directly in the portal and transfer them to the purchasing department: Order confirmations, shipping notifications, invoices and credit notes.

Alternatively, the supplier can also upload these documents. In both cases, the purchaser's SAP system automatically transfers the documents and data from the Business Partner Portal. All information and documents are available for purchasing and accounting directly in SAP for familiar processing. For those involved in the purchasing process, this eliminates the need for printouts and dispatch. The entire procure-to-pay process is much faster and known sources of errors such as media discontinuities - e.g. digitizing paper documents - are bypassed.

All information bundled in one place

The Business Partner Portal offers business partners helpful functions such as the self-service option. This enables a new supplier, for example, to enter all relevant information such as contact data and bank details. A workflow is started so that, after approval, the master data for this supplier is created accordingly in the SAP system.

Data can also be updated in this way. The Business Partner Portal can also be used to communicate with suppliers about individual transactions. For example, the supplier can ask questions about an order, and the customer can send him information about changes in address, for example. The advantage of this is that all information is available in a clear and traceable form in a central location and is no longer scattered across various e-mails, telephone notes, file folders and the like, as is usually the case.

Function for Dynamic Discounting

With the Business Partner Portal, the xSuite Group also offers a tool to manage liquidity in a targeted manner: Dynamic Discounting. Via the portal, suppliers can individually and flexibly offer an additional discount if an invoice is paid earlier. The company can select the discount amount and the associated payment term as desired, and it is also possible to offer several payment terms with different discount amounts - unlike the German cash discount with its rather rigid conditions.

The classic cash discount is not very widespread internationally. Even in other - non-German-speaking - EU countries, it is hardly found. This is shown, for example, by the fact that the CIUS (Core Invoice Usage Specification), which the EU defined in the context of Directive 2014/55/EU to promote electronic invoicing, does not provide for a cash discount in the standard. A field for cash discount only exists in the German version in the form of the XInvoice.

xSuite follows requirements of international clientele

On the other hand, the trend towards dynamic discounting has been gaining ground in recent years, particularly in the USA. In principle, this is the same as a cash discount, but more flexible or - as the name suggests - more dynamic in several respects:

Cash discount is usually specified within the terms of delivery. This means that the same conditions apply to all invoices from a supplier. With dynamic discounting, the possible discount is decided for each individual invoice. In the case of cash discount, there is also usually only one level. Regardless of whether the customer pays exactly on the agreed payment date for the discount or whether he pays a few days earlier: he receives the same defined percentage in both cases.

With dynamic discounting, there can be any number of intermediate stages with different payment terms and different discount levels. Without an automated system - such as the Business Partner Portal - it would be virtually impossible to manage these flexible gradations. Effort and error-proneness would be far too great. With this function, the xSuite Group follows the requirements of its growing international clientele.