SAP Ariba Procurement Reviews

I work in the digital strategy field for a financial services client. I mainly use Ariba to collect information and manage bills and other contractual information about vendors and contractors who work with me.

The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval.

Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture. In the next release, SAP should add links to artificial intelligence or some other technology that makes it easy to calculate third-party and vendor risk. For example, it could be interesting to include a feature that allows monitoring of clients' processes to evaluate the risk of lock-in and other internal process risks.

I've been using Ariba Procurement for about a year.

Ariba Procurement is very stable.

This is an SAP product, which means it's a blocked solution that relies on security. That means it's easier to scale if you have other SAP products in your architecture.

I would give Ariba Procurement a rating of eight out of ten.

The Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

We made custom enhancements to suite our business process.

Integration: SAP Ariba's integration has not matured yet, there is lot of scope for improvement in terms scenarios, error handling, data update intervals, etc.

Five years.

No.

No.

No.

A seven out of 10.

An eight out of 10.

Straightforward.

Vendor team: A six out of 10.

The PunchOut functionality is fantastic as it makes shopping very easy. This has saved us a lot of time in that employees can look directly on a vendor's website, see what's available, and order it.

Rather than having to run orders through the business office and have them placed by someone else, users can do their own shopping and submit their own carts. This has reduced a lot of data entry and improved efficiency, as we do not need to communicate lack of availability or other issues with an initial order request.

The SAP portion of the procurement is not always obvious or user friendly. Things such as cost center can be prepopulated for items selected, but the vendor cannot. For larger shopping carts, this becomes somewhat tedious having to enter the vendor 20+ times.

Over five years.

From the user end, not really. It can be frustrating if you forget to save your shopping cart that you lose all of your work, but we’ve learned not to leave a SC unattended anymore.

This is not applicable to me as the end user. I’m not sure if the university did or did not have any issues with scalability.

Similarly, any requests for technical support are not issued or run through me, so I don’t hear about its effectiveness.

BU did use a previous procurement system and we switched for two reasons. First, we switched because the university was changing its accounting system to SAP, and Ariba integrated with SAP. Beyond that, our old procurement system was simply severely outdated.

I was not present at BU when the initial set up occurred.

Similarly, I was not present during the initial purchase.

I’m sure other options were considered, but I was not involved.

As with many SAP products, I’d encourage users to recognize that it is a powerful but not intuitive product, and that training is vital.

SAP Ariba's Sourcing cloud based solution has the greatest quantifiable ROI of its solutions, which typically occurs within the first six months after acquisition for most companies. The ability to perform online auctions and RFPs has real savings implications which are incremental to traditional approaches and otherwise would be difficult to obtain.

For the companies that I have worked with, Ariba Sourcing has automated processes and standardized the sourcing process. It ensures that sourcing projects are performed consistently across your Purchasing or Procurement groups.

Gaining access to the sourcing project by the supplier needs improvement. There is room for improvement when multiple users at the supplier have accounts on the Ariba Network. These suppliers will typically struggle gaining access to your sourcing event, which could cause confusion and could require additional resources on the buyer side to troubleshoot and plan for.

10 years.

No.

SAP Ariba Sourcing is scalable for most sourcing events, but has limitations for larger sourcing events that involve more than 100 suppliers.

Technical support is excellent at SAP Ariba. The help desk is normally very knowledgeable about technical questions.

My clients have used different solutions including ePS, Scanmarket, and SciQuest (Jaggaer). While SAP Ariba is known for having the most functionality for sourcing projects, it also can be the most complex. To avoid complexity and keep processes as simple as possible, most companies could be successful saving 20% or more from SAP Ariba Sourcing by only utilizing about 60% of what Ariba Sourcing offers.

Initial set up with SAP Ariba Sourcing is straightforward. However, there are strategic decisions that must take place as part of the configuration. Namely, what strategic sourcing process will you want to build for your sourcing projects or what approval flows do you want to create as part of your sourcing steps.

The subscription pricing will vary based upon the number of buyer users that you want to set up. Also, pricing considerations will be determined to some degree based upon the number of sourcing projects and the spending that you plan to perform per year within the solution.

My clients have also chosen other solutions for P2P (Procure-To-Pay) and S2P (Source-To-Pay), including Jaggaer, ePS, and Scanmarket.

Focus on adopting as much as possible from the solution out-of-the-box. Trying to customize every process that you currently have in a cloud-based environment can add unneeded complexity to your business for years to come.