Category: Transport & Logistics

Highly Commended: Knorr-Bremse AG & Roche AG

Partner: Trade Information Network

Summing up: An innovative collaboration between two companies from different industries working together to benefit from a new multi-bank, multi-corporate digitised network.

What the judges said: “The aim for continuous improvement with the recent “full automation” via the Trade Information Network makes this really a sustainable success story!”

Key Facts:

• The new Trade Information Network (TIN) will provide opportunities for purchase order financing for the two corporates’ suppliers
• The IT, purchasing and accounting teams within Roche and Knorr-Bremse worked together on efforts to provide the right information to the new digitised platform

Knorr-Bremse is a German manufacturer of braking systems for rail and commercial vehicles that has been operating for more than 110 years. Roche is a Swiss healthcare and biotech firm.

While from different industries, these two large companies have come together to collaborate on their mutual involvement in a new initiative called the Trade Information Network (TIN). This platform sets itself out as an inclusive global multi-bank and multi-corporate network. It was established in September 2019 with six founding banks, including Deutsche Bank which has worked closely with both companies.

Both corporates were already pioneers within the supply chain finance market with Knorr-Bremse setting up a programme in 2007 with Roche swiftly following with their own platform in 2009.

They are now keen to expand the use of SCF beyond its traditional reverse factoring roots and develop other solutions to provide financing opportunities to their suppliers before they have even submitted their invoices.

By using TIN, both Knorr-Bremse and Roche are allowing their suppliers to submit their transaction data such as purchase orders, invoices, and shipment information, and share this information with their banks when they request working capital finance.

Banks can then offer financing as appropriate and the supplier can compare financing costs before making a decision. The financing will be provided outside of the network using the banks’ existing systems.

The platform aims to offer corporates an automated and secure means of communicating their trade information. It aims to simplify the number of interfaces suppliers usually work with, and they benefit from a one-time registration and standardized connectivity.

Roche and Knorr-Bremse’s legal departments, IT experts and purchasing teams came together to share ideas and work out together how they and their suppliers could benefit from their involvement in TIN.

The companies combine their purchasing departments to help each other in the correct recording of information on a purchase order onto their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems before transferring the status of each purchase order onto TIN.

The accounting departments worked in a similar way in ensuring the correct invoice information was transferred from ERP systems onto the two companies’ respective SCF platforms.

Similarly, the IT departments worked together to ensure the connections between the ERP systems and both the SCF platform and TIN were always live and suffered no outages.