Recent geopolitical tensions, trade dynamics, and regulatory pressures are creating uncertainty for businesses worldwide and exposing the fragility of supply chains.

Historically, enterprises optimised their supply chains towards the global linear economy. That’s “global,” meaning spanning multiple countries, and “linear,” referring to the path from production to distribution. If one link fails, such as with a shortage of raw materials or a blockage of a canal, the whole chain fails.

These disruptions have compelled business leaders to digitise their supply chains to make them more resilient and adaptable. By connecting processes, businesses gain real-time visibility and context for decision-making.

In other words, businesses can be more proactive rather than just reactive. The next evolution of this is orchestrating these processes and integrating them with AI.

What is supply chain orchestration?

Supply chain orchestration involves the seamless coordination and integration of all supply chain processes—from planning to procurement to manufacturing and beyond. By synchronising these traditionally siloed operations, businesses can ensure they continue to deliver products or services on time despite disruptions.

Orchestration is the next evolution of a digitised supply chain. By integrating all supply chain processes, businesses create a data ecosystem where information is contextualised and collaboration is easy. AI systems can also train on this context-rich data to extract actionable insights or provide relevant assistance.

Why do companies need supply chain orchestration?

A flexible supply chain is a resilient one, and orchestration emerges as one of the best ways for companies to ensure continuity of trade during disruption.

By integrating processes across the entire supply chain, companies gain more than end-to-end visibility—they also create a unified data ecosystem. Agentic AI can train on this specific data to provide highly relevant and contextual insights to guide decision-making. This capability allows leaders to respond quickly to changes in customer demand or disruptions to trade.

For example, orchestration would give a manufacturer visibility into their suppliers’ capacity and lead times. If they predict one of them is running low or late, the manufacturer could shift their sourcing to other suppliers and adjust their production timetable accordingly. This allows them to avoid unplanned downtime or revenue loss due to stock shortages.

A connected and contextualised supply chain is simply more resilient and agile, ready to navigate the uncertainties of a global market.

What’s preventing supply chains from being more resilient?

These are the factors compelling business leaders to consider supply chain orchestration.

External forces

1.     Geopolitical conflicts: Wars or diplomatic breakdowns can severely disrupt access to raw materials or shipping routes, forcing companies to find alternative sources or reroute logistics.

2.    Changing trade policies: From tariff increases to new sanctions, global trade policies can force companies to move their manufacturing elsewhere to remain compliant and profitable.

3.    Sustainability efforts: As consumers, investors, and governments demand stronger environmental accountability, regulations like emissions standards can encourage companies to seek greener, more transparent suppliers.

4.    Logistical bottlenecks: Blocked trade routes or congested ports can force cargo rerouting and inventory reallocation with little notice.

5.    Competitive pressure: Companies are under constant pressure to match their rivals’ lower costs or faster delivery, forcing them to optimise their supply chains to adapt.

Internal barriers

1.    Isolated and poor-quality data: Disconnected logistics and inventory systems can prevent accurate assessments of inventory levels and demand forecasting, leading to shortages, stockouts, and dissatisfied customers.

2.     Lack of end-to-end integration: Disruptions in one part of the supply chain may go unnoticed in others until it’s too late, causing delays and customer dissatisfaction.

3.    Legacy systems: Older IT systems cannot keep up with the complexity of today’s supply chains, making it difficult to respond to issues like shortages or demand spikes. They're also unlikely to support modern capabilities, such as predictive analytics.

4.    Manual, error-prone processes: Human error reduces efficiency and increases the likelihood of costly rework and delays.

5.    Lack of supplier visibility: Without real-time visibility into delays, shortages, or capacity issues, companies cannot react quickly, leading to missed production deadlines.

The quicker companies can resolve and alleviate these factors, the quicker they can achieve greater operational efficiency. The visibility, insights, and traceability orchestration provided can assist with this.

What are the consequences of ignoring supply chain orchestration?

To ignore supply chain orchestration is to remain vulnerable to operational slowdowns and shutdowns due to disruptions and shifts in regulations. Without end-to-end visibility and real-time insights, companies are less able to anticipate or respond to events such as port closures, supplier delays, or surges in demand. All these can compound into stockouts, revenue loss, and decreased customer loyalty.

Compliance with changing environmental regulations and trade policies is also challenging. Companies with siloed systems will struggle to track emissions or meet reporting standards, risking fines and restricted market access.

This is where AI becomes transformative. Agentic AI, trained on contextualised organisational data, can anticipate emerging risks, assess potential impacts, and recommend mitigation strategies. AI can do this far faster, freeing human workers to focus on higher-value tasks. However, this is only possible with organisation. It’s the foundation that enables AI to operate effectively and proactively across the supply chain, reducing total logistics costs.

Why should you use SAP Business Suite to orchestrate supply chains?

SAP Business Suite comes with everything businesses, regardless of size, need to orchestrate their supply chain processes from end to end. It provides operational visibility, automated workflows, and intelligent decision support to assist with everyday tasks and emergency disruptions.

What sets SAP solutions apart is how seamlessly they unify the applications and data used in each supply chain process—from procurement to manufacturing to logistics—into a connected ecosystem where cross-functional collaboration can flourish. With all departments working from a single source of truth, decision-making is faster and remains aligned with the broader organisation.

With connected data, leaders have rich, nuanced insights grounded within the context of the realities of their supply chains. Factor in the assistance of agentic AI, and they’ll be even better equipped to identify opportunities for growth, confident that it’s ensuring they’re staying compliant.

In summary, SAP Business Suite empowers organisations to stay one step ahead. They’ll have the foresight to predict changes in their supply chains and the agility to react to them. This, in turn, provides the foundation for scalable growth and sustainable innovation.

How SAP Business Suite helps with supply chain management

Supply chain management across design, planning, and operations

• Data-driven decision-making

  • Use real-time operational data and AI-assisted analytics to make informed, in-context decisions
  • Achieve end-to-end visibility over supply chain processes, from order management to logistics and distribution

• Multilevel supply planning

  • Anticipate and overcome supply chain disruptions with advanced available-to-promise (ATP) functions
  • Improve demand forecasting with machine learning algorithms, statistical modelling, and automated outlier correction in your sales history data

• Supply chain management

  • Assess supplier reliability based on historical performance
  • Collaborate with supply chain partners
  • Streamline procurement transactions with logistics and trading partners

• Warehouse and stock management

  • Optimise warehouse management and operations through automation
  • Reduce labour and inventory costs
  • Improve space and resource utilisation
  • Increase warehouse transparency and reduce risks such as stockouts and excess inventory

• Optimised logistics

  • Streamline and accelerate deliveries
  • Gain real-time visibility into inbound and outbound consignments
  • Enhance order management
  • Increase cost-efficiency of logistics and avoid logistical bottlenecks

Product research and development

• Relevant products

  • Identify the most urgent and promising product development projects by running crowd innovation campaigns
  • Use voice-of-the-customer systems to obtain customer feedback and insights

• Integrated innovations

  • Combine business and sensor data with engineering models to create digital twins
  • Connect 3D CAD data to ERP and data to visualise, test, and manage products using digital twins

• Accelerated product development Reduce time to value and costs with a scalable cloud-native solution, SAP Product Lifecycle Management, an SAP Supply Chain solution, that supports the entire collaborative idea-to-market process.

• Transparent product lifecycle management

  • Support decision-making and collaboration by providing a 360-degree overview of the entire product development process
  • Enforce consistent change management
  • Consolidate product, material, and packaging specifications in a single source of truth

Production planning and manufacturing execution

Streamlined production planning

Manage complex production planning cycles that involve multiple supply network partners, different production locations, and multilevel bills of material.

Informed manufacturing decisions

• Establish an uninterrupted flow of data across financial, operational, and supply chain processes
• Gain real-time insights, which help make decisions about production planning and manufacturing execution

Scalable production

Shift, adjust, and scale production in response to fluctuating supply chain conditions, seasonal challenges or demand, and new product launches—thanks to cloud scalability, it doesn’t have to involve extensive on-premises infrastructure.

Sustainability and responsible production

• Design and produce products sustainably
• Reduce waste and carbon footprint
• Minimise risks related to environmental regulations

Monitored manufacturing execution

• Empower shop floor operations personnel
• Enhance manufacturing performance
• Track and analyse production with manufacturing execution systems

Asset management and equipment maintenance

Extended equipment lifespan

Use real-time performance data gathered by IoT devices connected to equipment to optimise maintenance of physical assets, lower the risk of unexpected breakdowns, and increase equipment reliability.

Reduced downtime and costs

Prevent downtime by anticipating and addressing equipment failures before they even occur—a proactive approach made possible by AI-based predictive maintenance and digital twins.

Optimised spare parts inventory

Integrate asset and inventory management with digital supply chain solutions to minimise costs associated with excess stock or emergency sourcing of spare parts.

Simplified maintenance operations

Enable maintenance technicians to access manuals, work orders, and inventory information on mobile devices.

How to select the right software for your digital supply chain: Resources and practical tips

We know that decisions about supply chain management take time and research. For example, manufacturers looking to build a robust digital supply chain need to evaluate prospective software suppliers. Here are some green flags to look out for:

• Innovation: AI for supply chain and the use of AI in manufacturing are becoming increasingly widespread, so manufacturers should look for digital supply chain solutions that include or support AI capabilities.
• Scalability: The needs and challenges in supply chain management (and in smart manufacturing) can change quickly, so manufacturers that want to future-proof their digital supply chain need scalable, cloud-first software infrastructures, which would ensure the necessary flexibility and agility.
• Portfolio synergy: Manufacturers benefit from a versatile software portfolio, which includes digital supply chain solutions that are cross-compatible with other key systems already used in manufacturing, such as ERP.
• Privacy and security: Innovative digital supply chain solutions often rely on data, especially those using AI, so manufacturers should look for software providers that have a good record when it comes to data security.
• Success stories: Fine-tuning a digital supply chain is a high-impact initiative, so manufacturers need software providers with a proven track record of success, who have testimonials from successful customers, relevant case studies, and a solid reputation in the industry.

FAQs: SAP solution highlights

The following solutions are supplementary to SAP Business Suite and intended for highly specialised and specific use cases.