#makeprocurementawesome
After three days at the yearly SAP Ariba Live conference in Prague, I’m energized and fully loaded with new innovations. I can definitely confirm that the conference fulfilled my expectations, even above expectations.
SAP Ariba managed (as always) to facilitate this conference in a very good way and managed to attract many competent people under the same roof.
It was with a certain sense of professional pride that I saw the CPO at CircleK Europe taking the main stage at the opening session to talk about their SAP Ariba implementation which was performed by my Stretch colleagues.
I tried to attend as many breakout sessions as I could to get the most out of the conference but with more than 100 sessions I had to be selective.
New innovations at Ariba Live 2017
A lot of new innovations were presented and here are those that I found most interesting:
- Supplier Lifecycle & Performance: This solution allows you to qualify and segment all suppliers based on Commodity, Region and Business Unit and this you can selectively incorporate into your Source2Pay process.
- Supplier Risk: Solution that proactively shows your Supplier Risks to the relevant purchasers based on input from a large number of sources, including feeds from news around the world.
- Supplier Light Enablement on the Ariba Network: What can a free supplier Ariba Network account do versus a paid supplier account on the Ariba Network.
- Guided Buying: This not only allows you to ‘guide’ your purchasers to your preferred suppliers but it also is integrated with both SAP Leonardo and IBM Watson for some interesting Artificial Intelligence interactions.
- Guided Sourcing: Like Guided Buying, but then aimed at quickly building flexible sourcing events along with a contextual collaboration with stakeholders.
- Quote Automation for Sourcing: Creating a (simple) RFP from within your ERP and then have it posted externally on the Ariba Network.
- Sourcing Direct Materials: How Ariba functionally deals with Direct Materials complexities such as Bill of Materials, subcontracting scenarios, supply chain collaboration, supplier managed inventory and other key ERP backend functionalities
- Procurement Desk: This tool allows the Procurement Desk to operate efficiently in the same system to process PO exceptions from the different purchasers.
All though I attended the conference last week, I’m already now exited and look forward to the Ariba Live Conference next year. And I hope that my expectations for next year will be exceeded once more.
I very much look forward to utilizing these new features and functions in my next SAP Ariba project to make procurement awesome!
