Modernise your business with SAP Ariba

SAP Ariba is a cloud-based innovative solution that connects suppliers and buyers on a single platform and allows them to do business together. By providing more cost-effective ways to manage procurement and making business simpler, it improves the overall vendor management system of an organization. Ariba is used as a global procurement and supply chain management service and revolutionizes your supply chain, procurement, and contract management processes.

Ariba first developed the innovative cloud-based solution in 1996, which later got acquired by SAP in 2012 at a total cost of 4.3 billion USD with each share costing $45. Thus, the name SAP Ariba!

Today's world demands an effective supply chain management and collaborative approach between companies and their suppliers. In order to enable a healthy supply chain, suppliers must have visibility into every step of the procurement process in order to maintain a well-functioning supply chain and contribute to the growth of an organization. In the current business environment, procurement plays an important role in improving margins and enhancing a companies competitiveness. Purchasing the right components used to be as simple as finding them, but now it is more important to cultivate long-lasting business relationships while optimizing the logistics of procurement.

SAP Ariba offers a variety of solutions, here are 7 ways in which you can implement SAP Ariba solutions to modernize your business.

• Supplier Management:
  Ariba Supplier Management offers the capability of evaluating supplier performance and also interacting with new suppliers according to the latest procurement requirements. By analyzing articles, news stories, reports, and third-party content on the Internet, SAP Ariba allows companies to segment suppliers based on current information. Based on your criteria and filters, Supplier Segmentation allows you to quickly identify suppliers that qualify for full enablement.
  
  With supplier segmentation, you can:
  
  > Filter and segment vendors for full enablement based on chosen filtering criteria
  > Segment the data during upload or later
  > Fine-tune the segmentation results. Once the desired number of managed suppliers has been determined, run the segmentation again, confirm the results, and send to the approval department
  > Several segmentation runs can be run simultaneously and the results adjusted as needed. Saving and accepting the results will apply the recommended segmentation results and send them for approval.
  
  Supplier Risk, which is part of the solution range, allows suppliers to be alerted to risk by creating a view and alert configurations for their roles and relationships before procurement begins.

• Strategic Sourcing:
  Utilizing SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing, you can manage your whole sourcing process, including contracting, sourcing, and spend analysis for all material and service types. Ariba Contracts, a component of the portfolio of solutions, can manage contract processes, which are slow to move after supplier selection and require commercial cooperation, in a faster and much more efficient way. A solution like this lets companies manage multiple templates, keep track of compliance without requiring complex workflows, and access to a large library of contracts.

• Procurement:
  SAP Ariba Procurement helps you manage all operations in the procurement process from request to invoicing while bringing more options to the table through catalog enabling, and provides greater control over costs and risks. The ERP systems integrate seamlessly with your invoicing and payment processes so that your buying processes run at maximum efficiency.

• Financial Supply Chain:
  SAP Ariba Financial Supply Chain helps you automate the manual, paper-based processes associated with the procurement cycle. Errors in invoicing are notified to suppliers by intelligent invoicing functions. By analyzing your current payment terms and cash position in relation to your industry, the solution is capable of helping you manage your cash and liquidity.

• Spend Analysis: 
  Using its own Big Data analytics tools and grouping algorithms, Spend Analysis offers insights into not just procurement transactions on SAP Ariba, but also procurement processes on SAP ERP and non-SAP ERP systems. As a result, the spend analysis helps provide insight into the upcoming procurement activities.

• Buying: 
  Ariba's Buying solution allows customers to manage purchases with or without catalogs. Through cataloged buying management, purchasing requests can be accessed from the supplier catalog in the Ariba Network and new supplier catalogs can be generated on the system. By doing so, users can access the products to be purchased using SAP Ariba without needing any additional information.

• Contracts: 
  With SAP Ariba Contracts, you can track and manage all contracts related to a specific procurement in one place. Contracts can be monitored not just in terms of prices and quantities, but also in terms of their legal aspects. Using SAP Ariba, you can monitor contract expiration dates by utilizing the ready reports in the system and setting up alerts and notifications.

All of these solutions lead to benefits for both the buyer and supplier in the following ways:

• Reduces sales costs while simplifying the procurement process
• Allows access to a new source of suppliers, which nurtures the purchasing cycle
• Provides support for RFx, contracting, and pricing
• A user-friendly interface enables easy management of suppliers' catalogs
• Administrates the process of taking purchase orders, communicating relevant orders to the ERP system and invoicing and payment
• Develops a relationship of commercial trust between buyers and suppliers

If you want to manage all your procurement processes end-to-end in the cloud and become a part of the world's largest supplier market-place then let us help do that for you with Exalogic Consulting, a top SAP partner. Our team of exceptional SAP specialists is at the forefront of experimenting with technology that can improve results for our clients and be a part of your company's success story. Get in touch with our experts now to know more!