In the early years, the procurement process was about stocking supplies to keep a business running besides creating and maintaining long-lasting relationships.
In the post-COVID world, enterprises are looking for technology to build resilience and agility in their supply chains. Businesses have understood the importance of having a 360-degree view of their internal processes to manage them better.
The advent of the digital era has directed organizations to focus on optimized spending management and supply chain processes as it helps businesses achieve higher profit margins and strengthen market competitiveness.
According to a survey by Statista, supply chain disruptions cost organizations around the world an average of $184 million per year. This financial burden is the highest in the United States, with an estimated average annual cost of about $228 million.
Solutions that aid digital procurement and spend management allow organizations to effectively deliver on their primary objective by transforming processes at a reduced cost. New operating models, organizational constructs, and metrics help businesses embrace and nurture the new capabilities to meet heightened customer expectations.
SAP Ariba
SAP Ariba is a cloud-based platform for procurement, intelligent spend management, and supply chain services, suitable for enterprises of varying sizes. The solution is a bundle of strategic modules that can handle supplier management using spend analysis for purchases and contracts. This helps enterprises streamline their procurement and spend processes, identify potential savings, and build a stable supply chain using a single source of verified data.
With users slowly becoming part of an extensive worldwide B2B network, where companies interconnect, digitally collaborate, and virtually transact with suppliers and partners, the solution can help enterprises transform their purchasing and procurement processes.
For Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), SAP offers Ariba Snap. SAP Ariba takes over the procurement process in a single location in a convenient and automated way.
Let us look at the core components a little more in detail.
- The Supplier Management module evaluates existing suppliers and helps engage with new ones based on your unique spend management needs. It can quickly analyze articles, stories, and feedback in SAP Ariba and segment suppliers based on up-to-date information. The Supplier Risk solution allows users to configure risk views and alerts for each supplier relationship and role.
- Strategic Sourcing helps manage entire sourcing, contracting, and spend analysis processes for materials and services. The Ariba Contracts solution helps consolidate the contract processes and lends a comprehensive toolkit that offers multiple contract templates and easy workflows to help monitor compliance issues.
- Procurement manages all operational spend management processes from request to invoicing. Access to additional options through catalogue enablement and thereby helping gain more control over costs and potential risks. Given the efficient buying process, invoicing and payment transactions are seamlessly integrated into the ERP.
- SAP Ariba Financial Supply Chain automates all manual, paper-based processes in the spend management cycle. Intelligent invoicing functions alert suppliers of errors and enable cash and liquidity management by assessing the current payment terms and cash position.
- SAP Ariba Spend Analysis offers insightful analyses on the ERP procurement processes and sourcing activities on non-SAP ERP systems. A built-in tool is available for analyzing big data and group algorithms and spend analysis provides insights into upcoming procurement.
- SAP Ariba Buying supports catalogue and non-catalogue buying processes by helping the user create a catalogue directly in the system. This allows access to the required item via the Ariba platform without additional information.
- SAP Ariba Contracts can monitor contracts in terms of pricing, quantity, and legal aspects. Managing the contractual arrangements on the cloud-based platform allows businesses to track expiration dates through completion reports of the system.
SAP Ariba integration can improve the overall vendor management system of the business. It is cost-effective and simplifies operational aspects. SAP Ariba allows organizations to transform their spend management with a solution suite integrated into the digital core of SAP S/4HANA.
Handling procurement uncertainties and managing an efficient and effective supply chain system is a significant challenge. Enterprises need a reliable partner to address this challenge. Gemini Consulting & Services can help enterprises deploy SAP Ariba and collaborate with suppliers. Contact us to know how to integrate Ariba seamlessly with the SAP ecosystem to make your enterprise smarter and more efficient.
Key Benefits of SAP Ariba
- It is cloud-based. Hence can be accessed from anywhere, anytime and is easy to set up.
- Streamline and simplify processes from source to pay and bring them on a single integrated, agile platform. This helps enterprises to make better spending decisions.
- Easy integration with SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and other ERP software.
- Brings transparency and scalability into supplier risk, compliance and overall sustainability management
- Customized supplier onboarding, segmentation, and qualification based on location, category, and business units.
- Gain access to the Ariba network of 4 million connected companies.
- Gain superior data visibility with access to real-time information quickly.
- Improved collaboration with buyers and suppliers with set supplier targets, precise specific order details, identification and optimization potential. These can help enterprises prevent shortfalls.
- Automate processes with tight controls and reduce the cost of procurement.
- Increase efficiency by finding and consolidating suppliers quickly and managing the entire procure-to-pay processes in a single window.
