You use Ariba^® Network solutions to drive big value for your business—greater procurement efficiency, shorter buying cycles, lower processing costs, higher supply savings, and more. Yet strong supplier adoption plays a key role in the results you attain, and that can be tough to achieve. Even the best enablement strategy often fails to engage the long tail: those low-volume, price-sensitive, and small suppliers who lack e-commerce infrastructure.

What you need is a “Light Enablement” option that makes it easy to engage tail spend suppliers. And with the recent introduction of the new Interactive Email – Order feature, that’s exactly what you get. This valuable new addition to SAP Ariba’s suite of supplier enablement methods eliminates the complexity of onboarding suppliers who transact with you on a limited basis. By incorporating it as part of your overall enablement strategy, you gain a powerful resource to help you achieve the goal of 100% supplier adoption. Best of all, the feature is completely free for both you and your suppliers.

How Light Enablement works

With Light Enablement, you use the Interactive Email – Order feature on Ariba Network to send purchase orders to your suppliers. The supplier receives the embedded PO in the email, which includes smart buttons they can click to confirm the order and (once the order is fulfilled) create an invoice. To insure security and provide an audit trail, suppliers are also required to go through a one-time password authorization flow for each order confirmation and invoice they send.

Suppliers can complete everything they need to do via email, which means they don’t have to register on the network, fill out a profile, or pay fees. Yet because the process happens through Ariba Network, orders and invoices are still validated against your requirements and the network’s transaction rules, and reconciliation is almost identical to what you do for fully enabled suppliers. The result? You can effectively manage more of your spend through a single platform, since you no longer have to handle these transactions with a separate, manual process outside the network.

Optimizing enablement: One size does not fit all

Though Light Enablement gives you a great new tool, it should serve as just one component of your overall strategy for adopting suppliers. SAP Ariba offers multiple enablement options to choose from, and the best method to connect with each supplier depends on a range of considerations, including:

• The frequency, complexity, and volume of transactions you have with the supplier
• The supplier’s technical sophistication
• The strategic value the supplier represents to your business

Over the weekend, I finally had time to catch up with my nephew, who has been busy traveling around the country meeting with clients and customers interested in partnering with him on the latest creations in kids’ apparel. I was amazed to hear how he had such connections and managed to grow his clientele list so quickly, when not even a year ago, he was making his rounds in our local town stores and boutiques to see if they wanted to carry his apparel line. “It’s all about the networks,” was his response when I asked how he did it. Constantly on his iPhone, MacBook, and iPad Pro, he could barely finish a single thought with me during our conversation without devices chiming multiple times.

All about the networks…this millennial is not just on these mobile devices 24/7, but he is actually onto something much bigger. He’s not being lazy, mindlessly browsing online and playing games (as I initially thought) – he’s actually being smart and tapping into channels that allow him to discover, connect, and collaborate with his buyers and up-and-coming partners! The guy is really working and on his way to building his own commercial empire. He’s able to successfully network on networks, which enables him to grow his business and brand without having to spend long hours physically visiting storefronts to market his apparel. How brilliant is that? Saving time, energy, and money – while working smarter by embracing online tools and networks to get the job done. And now, he has interested buyers and partners flying him all over the place to do business with him. What a 360 from 10 months ago!

It seems like more and more entrepreneurs and businesses are leaning towards this trend of leveraging online channels and business networks to find new ways to stay agile and grow – both in customers and in sales. Do you blame them? Business networks like Ariba® Network add value to any business by allowing sellers and buyers to work together more efficiently and effectively on all the shared aspects of business commerce. It helps companies sell faster, smarter, and better. It changes the job of selling from complex to simple. How? Check out this Sell Simple video to find out! [For the Mandarin version, 让SAP Ariba为您简化销售流, click here. For the Japanese version, SAPアリバでシンプル売ります, click here.

From small minority-owned businesses to large Fortune 100 companies, many are finding tremendous benefit from networks such as SAP Ariba’s. By leveraging the power of networks, small to midsize organizations can compete on a global scale, and big businesses can remain nimble and ahead of their competition as market leaders. This is evident from hearing all the great success stories that customers shared at our SAP Ariba Live events in Las Vegas and Madrid earlier this year.

Don’t miss the opportunity to listen and network with your peers at the upcoming and final SAP Ariba Live 2016 event taking place in Singapore! If you haven’t already made plans to attend, we invite you to come join us for over two full days of insightful learning and the opportunity to make some great personal and professional connections.

Register for the event today and use coupon code ASIA16 to get 50 USD off your registration.

The news is out! Along with a wide array of innovations—including a new feature that lets suppliers begin transacting with buyers through Ariba^® Network for free—SAP Ariba is introducing greater simplicity and transparency in supplier subscriptions and pricing beginning in September of this year.

The move comes in direct response to buyer requests for easier onboarding of new suppliers and spend categories, and supplier requests for better alignment of features and costs to value. It also takes us a giant step closer to our ultimate goal: making it simple for you and your suppliers to conduct commerce on a single, global platform—so you can run your business more effectively and efficiently than ever before.

Supporting faster, smoother growth

By addressing key challenges from the previous pricing structure, the new usage-based supplier fee model will encourage stronger supplier adoption and also pave the way for suppliers to move faster up the e-commerce maturity curve. And the new Interactive Email – Order feature provides a no-cost “Light Enablement” option to help engage long-tail suppliers, making it easier for you to transact with all your suppliers through Ariba Network.

Many of the innovations already launched or slated for imminent release[i]play a big part in this evolution as well, delivering additional opportunities for collaboration plus enhanced functionality and results for both you and your suppliers. These include:

• The AribaPay^™ solution, an automated, award-winning B2B payment tool that combines detailed remittance information and end-to-end visibility into payment status with the speed and security of electronic payments.
• The Ariba^® Spot Buy solution and Ariba Spot Buy for Network Suppliers, enabling you to drive efficiency and compliance across a previously unmanaged area of spend while opening up a vast new sales channel for suppliers.
• Ariba Collaborative Supply Chain to support real-time collaboration and complete supply chain visibility in direct materials spend, helping you and your suppliers work together more effectively to make fast, informed decisions that optimize efficiency and reduce risk.
• An enhanced user interface on the supplier portal, with a new dashboard that displays the most-important information suppliers need to complete day-to-day tasks.
• The Ariba^® Supplier mobile appgiving suppliers secure, on-the-go access to their Ariba Network account so they can manage transactions, find information, receive alerts, and collaborate with trading partners right from their mobile device.
• The Ariba^® Exchange User Community where suppliers get always-on, in-application access to relevant content, context-sensitive help, immediate support, and direct collaboration with other users and Ariba experts.
• The soon-to-be-launched Integration Gateway that will let suppliers “connect once” to Ariba Network to integrate quickly with any customers, supporting touchless transacting across more relationships.

Subscription details: Greater benefits, clearer value

The new subscriptions will offer additional services and capabilities in several key areas:

• Marketing—with new digital achievement badges to help suppliers showcase their e-commerce capabilities and Ariba Network expertise.
• Efficiency—with new tools through the Ariba Discovery^™ service to support the buying needs of all suppliers.
• Support—with a dedicated supplier support channel planned for a future release that will give top-tier suppliers faster, more personalized assistance so they can resolve issues immediately.
• New sales opportunities—with all the benefits of the Ariba Discovery Advantage package bundled into the Gold and Platinum subscriptions, allowing suppliers at those levels to respond to an unlimited number of sales opportunities from buyers in an active purchasing cycle.

    KayRee Lee, Director, Value Realization, SAP Ariba

Satchel Paige said it best: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” The truth is, plenty of companies could be threatening your market position—but without accurate data to tell you the real story, you might not know till it’s too late.

So what’s the best way to evaluate where you stand, and what steps should you take to get ahead? Benchmarking. And while tracking progress against your own internal goals is important, knowing how you’re performing compared to competitors is even more crucial in today’s fast-moving global economy. That’s where the SAP^® Ariba^® Benchmark Program comes in.

Support on a world-class level

Each year, we conduct an extensive benchmarking survey designed to help customers understand the performance landscape and identify key opportunities for improvement. Participation is free and delivers a broad array of benefits for your business. By analyzing transaction data collected from you and other SAP Ariba customers—along with data from more than 18,000 SAP customers worldwide—we can provide a clear, objective picture of your current position, helping you to:

• Accurately assess your company’s technology and process performance
• Measure and compare solution adoption rates
• Gauge how your business stacks up to leaders, competitors, and peers
• Identify best practices and key opportunities for improvement
• Quantify the savings you can achieve through targeted strategies
• Build success plans based on facts, not speculation

This year’s survey launches in September, and participant data will be gathered, extracted, and analyzed over a period of two months. Once the results have been tallied, you’ll receive a customized benchmark report with aggregate statistics and insights that show where you stand in relation to your peers. Your account manager will also work with you directly to create a strategic plan based on the findings, helping you enhance effectiveness in the areas most critical to your success.

Intelligence-based insights

So what sort of feedback and information can you expect? Though your results will be customized, here are two examples of benchmarking-driven insights and recommendations drawn from previous surveys.

Benchmarking insight #1: Organizations that use online catalogs with rules-based checks enabled to support self-service requisitioning for material and service items have 2.8X more touchless invoices and a 55% lower requisition-to-order cycle time (just 4.8 hours for organizations in the top quartile).

• Recommendation
  • Increase your company’s self-service purchasing by enabling more electronic catalogs and contracts.
• Strategies
  • Identify ad-hoc POs created against suppliers that have catalogs, and then migrate those to catalog POs
  • Negotiate discounts on a broader list of items to expand catalog content
  • Prominently feature supplier catalogs on your buying home page
  • Identify frequent purchasing requestors and convert them to self-service requestors
  • Create a marketplace environment with intuitive tools to help guide users through the experience
  • Provide support so users don’t feel deserted, such as an easy-to-access link to professional buyers via help desk support
• Benefits
  • Provides users with 24x7 access to a guided buying experience
  • Encourages users to purchase from approved suppliers, minimizing the use of ad-hoc POs and maximizing compliance with negotiated pricing
  • Frees up procurement staff to focus on more strategic, value-added activities
  • Enhances spend visibility via standardized catalog information
  • Cuts costs and reduces cycle times required to process transactions
  • Eliminates invoice errors, leading to a greater number of touchless supplier invoices

Benchmarking insight #2: Organizations with a resolute focus on sourcing optimization realize significant financial gains: top-quartile organizations achieve savings of 7.8% per sourced spend, driving 70% higher savings per 1B USD in spend compared to average performers, which translates to 32M USD per 1B USD in spend.

• Recommendation
  • Develop a best-in-class program utilizing e-sourcing tools to identify and implement sourcing savings opportunities.
• Strategies
  • Conduct frequent spend reviews with stakeholders to find new areas of consolidation or contract review
  • Focus on large global categories, but employ rigor in geographic markets to drive local competitiveness
  • Formalize a comprehensive category strategy that includes all savings levers, engage key stakeholders, optimize specifications, and measure total cost of ownership and outcomes
  • Consider a demand management strategy to reduce volume through formal category buying policies
  • Create a tactical sourcing strategy to more effectively manage one-off buys (e.g., using the Ariba^® Spot Buy solution) where spend is not formally sourced
  • Evaluate length/term of contracts to drive better cost outcomes (e.g., short-term contracts are best used for commoditized/volatile products, while long-term contracts are more appropriate for strategic partnerships to incent innovation and cost reductions)
• Benefits
  • Encourages competitive pricing from more suppliers, leading to higher savings
  • Reduces sourcing cycle times through communication and workflow functionality that enable categories to be sourced more quickly and efficiently
  • Drives a more consistent and scalable sourcing process through standardized usage of tools and templates
  • Allows you to conduct sourcing events more frequently, leading to fewer longer-term contracts and sole sources of supply
  • Supports better collaboration and communication with suppliers through interactive functionality that the tools provide

Get started today

The 2016 SAP Ariba Benchmark Program will be open for enrollment in early September, so be sure to take advantage of this unique opportunity to enhance your business performance. To get additional information, go to the SAP Ariba Benchmark Program web page or contact your account manager.

Is it possible to start an issue log outside of a project? I would like to keep a general log of issues, opened tickets, etc that would not be captured as part of a project.

Christopher

I am in the process of building my KPI's while learning Ariba. I have watched several videos and read pdf's and I am still a little confused. Selecting KPI is base on a report is straight forward. My question is selecting KPI based on Survey. If I select this is the next step to go in and create a survey by adding questions? Instead of doing that couldn't I just select add a question? For example customer service, I want to have people respond to a few questions. To function properly does it need to be in a survey or can it be questions each with a list of choices within the KPI?

Thanks for any suggestions, including training videos or documents that I can refer to for info.

Christopher

For the P2P or Procurement content solutions, we are looking for ways to export the purchase requisition back into SAP for further processing.  Anyone have any experience with this?

Hi Experts,

Why few Supplier has buyersystemid value starting with 'cs_' ?

Thanks.

As a schedule task performs a specific task at a given schedule,

is it possible to schedule an integration event. If can be scheduled, in how many ways can it be scheduled.

What is the data detention period for Ariba? Will it be same for all the modules?

I would like to be able to export from my test library. The instructions below look pretty straight forward except I can't find an action for "Export". Suggestions greatly appreciated, really don't want to have to recreate all of these KPI's.

Christopher

Hello,

I created a report to track POs that have been received, but not invoiced. In the Receipt Date column, there are a number of fields that say "Unclassified". Could anyone please help me understand what this means? Thank you!

Hi Exchange,

Do we have a repository of Industry specific Supplier Profile Questionnaires that to can be tweaked further by buying org's needs?

For instance I want to create an SPQ for Oil and Gas buyer organisation. Do we have a good SPQ to start with?

Thanks/Lalith

Is it possible to create reports on tasks that are not associated with projects. I would like to be able to create tasks for vendors that are not associated with a SIPM project and then generate reports on the status of those tasks. As an example say I have ten outstanding action items (tasks) for vendor A. I have a weekly call to review outstanding items at which time we update an excel spreadsheet. I know I can generate individual tasks, assign, get status updates, send reminders and past due notices. What I would like is to be able to aggregate those tasks in a single report. I know there are other options on the market but I am trying to consolidate all my SIPM into one program and right now that is Ariba.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Christopher

Hello

How can my client make the release in Ariba if its version is very old. They have Ariba from 11 years ago.

Thanks for you comments.

Hi Experts,

A PO got stuck in 'Ordering' state with the following error " Ariba version number is not greater than Oracle version number" (User just changed few lineitems)

Please let me know the cause for this error

Thanks

Hi All,

We are using "Sourcing Approver" group for all our Sourcing Assocaites to get the required access. As per the enablement work book, user should be getting "Create Knowledge Project" option also if we assign "Sourcing Approver" group. Currently in the application they are not getting "Create Knowledge Project" even though required groups are assigned.

Can anyone help us with that?

Neelanarayanan

Hi Exchange,

Have you attempted archiving any transactional information from Ariba (documents and data)?

What is the best archival software if there is any compatible with Ariba?

There's one tool named HP Records Manager for archiving transactional information from a different system. But that might not fit Ariba so well.

Would love to hear comments from Exchange!

Thanks/Lalith

Hi Folks,

I am working on S4H integration with Ariba. I created a purchase order in S4H and when look at the messages, I see nothing. I think, I need to configure the workflow.

Does anyone have any inputs on this or documentation on this one.

Regards,

Nadeem Ahmed

Hi folks,

I am having below few queries -

1. While awarding for the sourcing event, I am trying to attach the documents to send to awarded supplier in Scenario creation but not able to see any option. Is there any way ?

2. Suppose 1 supplier has been at rank 2 during bidding and now offline he's giving bid value less than rank1 (L1) supplier. How to handle such cases. Do we need to do re-auction or can we maintain somewhere in Ariba to avoid discrepancy.

3. Can we re-open the Auction once it is in Review/Pending selection state ?

Your inputs would be helpful.

Rgds,

Sourabh