Recognizing this potential, the City of Antibes and have joined forces to redefine digital contract management with a focus on public procurement processes. Patrick Duverger, chief technology officer of the City of Antibes, describes its previous procurement operations as follows: 鈥淎lthough we achieved a high level of operational proficiency, our business processes lacked full traceability. This resulted in process opacity when it comes to recurring delays, delivery errors, or administrative sanctions. By gaining a deeper understanding of our processes, we can optimize them, reduce costs, and minimize business risks.鈥� 

Transparent and Traceable Collaboration 

The lack of visibility and traceability in these processes hindered automation, cross-organizational data and process mining, and intelligence. This directly affected how disputes were resolved and impacted organizational budgets.聽

To address this challenge, 麻豆原创 Innovation Center Network developed a prototype based on the service, combined with a blockchain-based shared ledger on 麻豆原创 HANA Cloud. 鈥淭his prototype aims to replace manual practices with automated, cross-company orchestrations. By using an 麻豆原创 HANA Cloud shared ledger, organizations like the City of Antibes can benefit from a permissioned, publicly verifiable, and immutable audit trail of cross-organizational interactions,鈥� says Benjamin Stoeckhert, innovation product manager at 麻豆原创 Innovation Center Network, illustrating the potential of this innovation.聽

鈥淟everaging the full potential of an 麻豆原创 HANA Cloud shared ledger allows us to connect digital platforms that unite businesses and government to track the compliance of services and product deliveries according to contractual terms and conditions,鈥� explains Duverger. 鈥淲e can leverage data from different parties, such as logistics companies and quality certification bodies, and move beyond the era of cumbersome paperwork and manual processes. For example, this pattern is applicable to procurement processes where multiple parties verify the compliance of suppliers and their deliveries.鈥�

Complete Control of Unencrypted Data 

However, opening up collaborative processes directly conflicts with customer privacy concerns. This dilemma poses a significant challenge for next-generation contract management. How can businesses ensure transparency without compromising the privacy of private business information and processes? Duverger emphasizes the importance of protecting sensitive public procurement secrets: 鈥淐onfidentiality, including negotiated prices and deal sizes, is paramount for us and our suppliers.鈥� 

In response to this pressing need, the 麻豆原创 Security Research team, in collaboration with the 麻豆原创 Innovation Center Network blockchain team, has extended 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration with a hardware-based privacy-enhancing technology (PET) innovation. Dr. Laurent Gomez, who led this innovation with Antibes, explains: 鈥淏efore committing a transaction to the shared ledger, organizations encrypt it along with its associated sensitive information, using their own managed cryptographic material. Encrypted data and processes are only processed within secure and trusted hardware modules, with the explicit consent of each stakeholder.鈥澛�

This innovation can unlock significant business value by helping to automate cross-company operations and protect the privacy of customer data while still allowing for analysis. The key contribution of this approach is that it gives customers complete control and ownership of their encrypted material. 鈥溌槎乖� can never access unencrypted data; the only data that leaves our information system is encrypted by us,鈥� says Duverger. 鈥溌槎乖� Business Technology Platform (麻豆原创 BTP) allows us to hold our own encryption keys, which is different from competing solutions.鈥� 聽

5% Less Late Payment Penalty Costs 

The co-innovation has revealed the bottlenecks that slow down the procurement process at the City of Antibes and lead to late payment penalties for suppliers and delivery delays. 鈥淏y adopting this secure distributed ledger approach, we have improved these key performance indicators without changing the process itself. We can now reliably manage all our procurement transactions,” says Duverger. “A key achievement was that we reduced our delinquency rate by 5%, which significantly minimized the impact of late payment penalty costs on our global spend budget.鈥澛�

The project was recently recognized at the highest national level with the Territoria Gold Award by the French Ministries of the Interior, Ecological Transition, and Territorial Cohesion.

To find out more about 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow, get in touch with us at icn@sap.com.

Corinna Schmidt is part of NVT Communication at 麻豆原创.

Consequently, it鈥檚 no surprise that during its 鈥業nnoDay,鈥� , a globally leading manufacturer of equipment for the development and production of drugs, identified manual and cross-company processes as the most promising area for digital innovation projects.

鈥淚nnoDay provides an open platform for creating digital innovations. Innovation is part of our corporate culture and supported by an environment and leadership that encourages creativity. Scalable innovation requires integration into existing processes and systems. Therefore, 麻豆原创 Innovation Center Network is our prime partner to validate and realize this potential,鈥� said Thomas Lata, manager of IT Order to Cash at Sartorius.

Typically, processes within patient care and the healthcare system require companies to work with one another to achieve the same goal. This is especially apparent when it comes to removing harmful microorganisms on medical equipment, where a single error would lead to drug contamination. Sterilization processes are directed and executed between medical equipment manufacturers and sterilization service providers and overseen by regulatory organizations and pharmaceutical companies. In most instances, these processes are manual and paper-based, making them inefficient, unclear, and susceptible to having crucial details fall through the cracks.

With the lack of automation, transparency, and speed, sterilization processes and all the teams and companies involved needed a solution 鈥� which is when 麻豆原创 and Sartorius began working together. Based on the service, the two organizations developed a prototype that aims to replace manual practices with automated cross-company orchestrations. 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration is a blockchain-based innovation extending 麻豆原创鈥檚 no-code workflow capabilities on .

鈥淲hile many internal processes can be digitized and automated with powerful tools and platforms, cross-company processes are often still very manual and lack transparency,鈥� said Benjamin Stoeckhert, senior business development manager of Blockchain at 麻豆原创. 鈥淲ith the cross-company workflow collaboration service, we aim to solve this issue and replace manual, error-prone practices with real-time automation, boosting efficiency and compliance.鈥�

麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration can be used to orchestrate and automate sterilization processes between Sartorius and other sterilization service providers. In addition to being more dynamic, the service also operates within an immutable shared blockchain ledger, enabling other market participants like pharmaceutical companies and regulators to verify the process compliance via a digital audit trail. This eliminates the need for paper documents.

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In an 麻豆原创 Sapphire session with Sartorius, Philippe Sanner and Alban Zacharia, in-house IT consultants with Sartorius, and Stoeckhert from 麻豆原创 explained that using 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration has eliminated repetitive tasks, which in turn has increased security and efficiency.

Sanner said, 鈥淭he immediate benefits we can think of are permitted by the automatization and collaboration capabilities. This saves a lot of time, and the business process experts can focus on more value-add activities. In addition, reducing paper wherever possible is also very important for Sartorius, as sustainability is one of our core values鈥�.

麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform brings many capabilities in one, unified environment, which allows to seamlessly combine 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration with 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud. 鈥淲e have been pretty impressed with the data analytics capabilities. All information is available at the same place, and it is easy to implement personalized, user-friendly KPIs. This helps us detect risks and measure collaboration performance in real time,鈥� Sanner added.

Zacharia emphasized the importance of openness for cross-company automation: 鈥淎nother key feature of the service is that it can connect participants with 麻豆原创 and non-麻豆原创 systems. This allows scaling to all actors in the process.鈥�

鈥淲ith this prototype, we can demonstrate what a blockchain-based solution could really look like and we can offer real-time sterilization transparency for our customers,鈥� Zacharia said.

To learn more about 麻豆原创 Cross-Company Workflow Collaboration, e-mail cross-company@sap.com.

Corinna Schmidt works in Communications for 麻豆原创 New Ventures and Technologies.