How SAP’s Ariba will Significantly Help Reduce Procurement Cycle Times.

Posted By Terry Vermeylen


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Want to reduce procurement cycle times and drastically cut accounts payable, sourcing, VAT compliance costs AND effortlessly oversee your spend costs? Adopted by 79% of Fortune 500 companies. Ariba delivers cloud-based E- Procurement solutions with advanced analytics to make it easier to just do that, as well as, enabling you to routinely find new businesses to collaborate with. Ariba allows common access to a server instance for multiple companies using any browser, and integrates with SAP ECC or any back office system. Ariba is a cutting edge Digital Technology tool. This is creating an exceptional customer experience!

A sample of Ariba features are;

  • Spend analysis – How much are you spending? Where are your opportunities to improve products or suppler spending? What are the supply market trends? Log into a customizable dashboard to view advanced analytical spend data to search and find supplier behavior and opportunities. Integrate your data from any system to classify spend, supplier and market data to perform vendor comparison, benchmarking with peers, regroup supplier fragmentation, and find substantial future savings.
  • Ariba Exchange – User on-line community search capabilities, procurement best practices and collaboration with specialists and partners.
  • Strategic sourcing – Where do you want your savings and risks to be? Collaborate with an up-to-date on-line network of over 2 million suppliers around the globe to shorten the sourcing cycle, find cost savings and reduce supply risks. Use Ariba’s sourcing events and negotiation tools to standardize sourcing and find new suppliers across departments and for your internal customers.
  • Contract management – See all your contracts and continuous supplier performance metrics in one place. Contracts are linked to all Ariba sourcing events to review current or previous costs, quality or other required qualitative data.
  • Procurement – Use a simple consumer-like shopping experience; for indirect and operational spending with easy catalog maintenance. Use mobile applications to track delivery and expedite information. Ariba invoice is digital, automated and paperless via the Ariba network to seamlessly transmit information reducing invoice cycle times. Errors and exceptions are detected at the line item level and use an automated approval routing. Standardize the yearly Procurement planning cycle by logging into the Ariba spend analytics dashboard, perform strategic sourcing, and then finalize contracts. Reduce the plan, buy and pay cycle in one Ariba e-procurement platform for both buyers and suppliers.
  • Supplier management – Manage performance, risk assess environmental compliance, safety, regional, innovation, collaboration or any supplier data to enable one source of truth on a supplier. Classify and grade suppliers and run corrective action plans to fix issues and store all information in one single place. Standardize the Supplier management process, create supplier knowledge projects to store all required continuous relationship information including brochure and conference information.
  • Financial supply chain management – Integrated cash management strategy. Payment discount refinement by fast-tracking payments for approved invoices to strategic suppliers in return for discounts, earning an immediate return on their cash. Suppliers can benefit from visibility into future cash flows with payment timing and cash flow analysis. Ariba pay digitizes the goods and services payment process with electronic payments using the Ariba ad Discovery networks. Eliminate phone calls, faxes and emails to further reduce costs.
  • Supply chain collaboration – Use the Ariba Network and integrate with your ERP to collaborate with suppliers. Onboard suppliers to have real time information on demand information, forecasts and orders. Improve time to market, rapid and accurate sourcing, and enable supply chain transparency.  Reduce Procurement cycle times and costs using the Ariba Value Cycle;

Reduce the Procurement cycle.

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How Can Ariba help reduce S&OP cycle times and costs?

Indirect and Direct Procurement is a huge part of the S&OP cycle and essential to meeting Demand. In the S&OP cycle demand is analyzed, then a Supply plan is created, usually once a month. By reducing this entire cycle by a week or two the company becomes more efficient, able to react to changes more quickly.  Ariba has multiple tools to reduce the Procurement cycle which in turn reduces the S&OP cycle.  Here’s a look at the S&OP Cycle.

SOP process overview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://worldclasssupplychain.com/lessons-learned-from-attaining-world-class-sales-and-operations-certification.php

Let’s recap

  1. Ariba is a cloud-based collaborative E-Procurement solution with advanced analytics, on-line communities and advanced sourcing, contractual, spend, and Supply chain capability, adopted by 79% of Fortune 500 companies.
  2. Ariba allows common access to a server instance for multiple companies using any browser for buyer and seller collaboration. .
  3. Direct Procurement is also a vast part of the S&OP structure and it can help to reduce the entire S&OP cycle time.

As well as being an IT and Supply Chain consultant Terry Vermeylen is the founder of Mylifechanges.com  and Worldclasssupplychain.com and President of Terry Vermeylen Enterprises Inc.

 

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