SAP Ariba: Supplier Risk Management

The Challenge

SAP Ariba is the biggest business commerce platform in the world, powering more than $3 trillion in commerce annually. To increase its value proposition, SAP engaged Semantic Visions to create a supply-chain risk-detection tool that could give its customers real-time insights into the activities of more than 4 million buyers and suppliers around the world.

Developing such a solution is a major technological challenge. Given the scale of SAP’s business and the necessity of continuous monitoring, we needed to build a system that could protect customers from exposure to reputational, compliance, financial, sustainability, and operational risks. This required software that could monitor and detect threats before they materialize, and to track the activities of small suppliers, which can be difficult to identify accurately. 

Moreover, to identify risks at their source, we needed to make the solution global to capture and analyze online content in as many languages as possible.  

The Solution

To overcome the significant technical challenge of distinguishing signal from noise, we used our proprietary AI solution based on advanced semantic analysis (ASA) and big data semantics (BDS) to analyze billions of online news sources collected with our military-grade Open-Source Intelligence system. ASA generates granular and precise metadata based on a cross-language principle, while BDS synthesizes scenarios into events, sentiment, context, and entities (like location, organization, company, and people). The resulting platform helps SAP clients monitor risks across a dozen major world languages in real time.

Our solution has an additional advantage over traditional risk registries: unparalleled supplier insight. Because most of the companies contracted by SAP clients are small and medium-sized enterprises operating under the same name but in different industries, geographies, and jurisdictions, it can be difficult to monitor their activities. Our tool solves this challenge by collecting huge troves of data in multiple languages, pulling back the curtain on even the darkest corners of the global supply chain.

The Result

Today, our SAP Ariba Supplier Risk solution is used by hundreds of the world’s largest multinational corporations, including Fortune 500s, helping SAP’s clients make due diligence a key piece of the procurement process. With Semantic Visions’ supply chain risk tool, clients are avoiding unnecessary disruptions, protecting revenue and reputation, and ensuring that ethical and business insights are driving global supply chains.