From restaurant chains to pharmaceutical companies, businesses in every industry must innovate and bring new products to market quickly in order to survive and grow. That's why we recently launched the demo series Move Your Supply Chain Forward, where we show you how Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management provides the tools that your product development, supply chain, and manufacturing teams need to create and launch new products and services-whether it's capturing ideas that meet customer requirements, forecasting demand for new products, or collaborating with suppliers on new innovations. In the third live demo of the series, Glenn Florance and I shared how Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement simplifies and de-risks the procurement process.

In this era of complex supply chains, having an unreliable supplier network not only impedes the innovation process, it also poses a huge threat to the survival of a company. As procurement continues to play a strategic role in product innovation, supplier collaboration is needed to drive cost savings, reduce risk, identify new opportunities, and accelerate time to market.

Unfortunately, many research and development (R&D) departments fail to include their suppliers in the innovation process. This results in increased supplier risk, slower time to market, and inconsistent negotiation practices-all of which are costly to a company and its shareholders.