Purchasing Platform vs. SAP Ariba

SAP Ariba is pivotal for our organization's supply chain requirements. The purchasing department needs it for vendor purchase order issuance and vendor order management. We can check procurement history for the last purchased price, standard price, price breaks, lead time for products, vendor, and alternate vendor details.

Incentivized

• Complete Procurement of Inventory step easy through GUI-Ariba integration once Purchase order is created and it is sent to the SAP Ariba Supplier Network. Vendor confirms the order and sends notification of Inbound Delivery to the warehouse through ASN and the Inbound process, Goods Receipt Process, Unloading, Put away process easy.
• SAP Ariba integrates the different SAP Sourcing platforms, services and their tools in order to optimize operations, saves cost and meeting customer requirements through its easy to use tools. Such as integration with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP EWM using Idocs for End to End sourcing and Procurement coverage.
• As a part of the SAP Direct Sourcing suite, it helps allow customer manage their direct materials in the single dashboard and helping customer to have view of the comprehensive info about BoM and the structure. Based on requirements, buyers can run materials and/or entire Bill of Materials. When these are sent from ERP to SAP Ariba, managers can manage them in the direct spend dashboard. Can search for desired items in the dashboard and view details of BoM or deeper view of information of the material. Buyers can run sourcing, run details for materials, create material quotes, and create pricing using book quotes.

Incentivized

• Integration with other tools is not very good. The APIs provided are not scheduled within the Ariba process and must use a middleware to send information back and forth between tools
• Customer support for configuration questions. The response time can be weeks or months waiting time and the response back is often unhelpful.
• Flexibility with company entities. With a large company with so many entities it is hard to structure and customize your suppliers into many entities. You often have to duplicate.

Incentivized

Established product and we are now using it as a mean for our procurement transformation

While its great at usability. I would love ut have it more simplified. I would like to advocate for some personas who are non tech savvy or who have less or no experience in procurement. I sometimes feel that the valley of user learning fir such personas is quite steep and it may take them long time of learning to get adept to the platform.

Incentivized

Customer support has always been top notch. From small configuration changes to overall process changes, support has the teammates in place with excellent knowledge and is able to provide solutions based on business challenges quickly. Their customer support through their Account teams continues to be hands on and very responsive to needs in a timely fashion.

It's important to note that user experiences may vary, and the perceived areas for improvement depend on the specific needs and expectations of each organization. Frequent updates and feedback from users often guide software developers in addressing these areas to enhance the overall user satisfaction with the platform

Incentivized

• We saved nearly 10% of planned costs due to the large database of vendors we created within the company as a whole.
• Saving in time due to shortening of procurement cycles. Procurement activities were never on the critical path and were accomplished with less Supply Chain resources than originally planned.
• In the process we created a huge database of Vendors and Pricing which well be beneficial in our future projects.
• It is an excellent tool and just what are business required and could afford.