SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) is built on the technology platform of SAP NetWeaver, allowing multiple levels of suppliers, partners, and manufacturers to work together on core supply processes, including:

Strategic Purchasing and Sourcing

• Supply strategy development -- Develop sound supply strategies with new tools and capabilities for demand aggregation, portfolio analysis, category (commodity) management, and purchasing controlling.
• Spend analysis -- Improve your visibility into global spend and supply-base data by mapping and cleansing commodity and vendor information, and distributing it to internal systems, electronic catalogs, and data warehouses.
• Supplier selection -- Minimize purchase risk, improve supply-base monitoring, and assess supplier performance by using electronic auction and bidding tools to collaborate with pre-selected suppliers.
• Contract management -- Ensure compliance with negotiated terms and conditions, and leverage preexisting contracts for specific product categories shared throughout the company.
• Catalog management -- Create and manage a unified e-commerce catalog, using tools that import data from external sources, maintain consistent schemas, and index items for faster search capabilities.

Operational Procurement

• Self-service procurement -- Empower employees to procure materials using Web-based tools that enforce compliance with corporate policies.
• Plan-driven procurement -- Streamline and automate the procurement of the materials used in core business processes by integrating purchasing with any supply chain management system.
• Services procurement -- Reduce the administration and processing costs associated with procuring a wide range of services, including consulting and contract labor.

Supplier Collaboration

• Supplier registration -- Give purchasers access to supplier-managed company information for better sourcing decisions.
• Order collaboration -- Streamline procurement processes by providing supplier access to internal order management systems.
• Design collaboration -- Shorten product development cycles by enabling employees from different trading partners to share relevant product and project information.
• Collaborative replenishment -- Optimize supply-chain performance by enabling suppliers to access customer inventory data and maintain required inventory levels on an exception-based replenishment process.
• Supplier connectivity -- Connect with suppliers of different sizes and capabilities using XML-based document exchange.