SAP offers spend management solutions that help companies gain insight, improve savings, and take control of their entire business spending. Spend management begins with the digitalization of sourcing, contracting, and purchasing processes, along with processes for managing suppliers, invoices, and payments. These functions are then consolidated into one simple, intelligent process carried out on a single, cloud-based platform integrated with a digital business network.
Strategy and Planning
SAP Spend Control Tower delivers:
- AI-driven insights and opportunities to accelerate business decision
- Contextual reports to deliver insights inside the process flows where they are the most valuable
- Consolidated and modernized UX/UI to provide a single look and feel across all reports
- Faster access to key data – with datasets updated in near real-time to allow for more timely analysis
- Reporting built on a single data lake for end-to-end data harmonization
- Ability to benchmark an organization against best-run organizations across their industry.
Source-to-Contract
To successfully source goods and services, it's essential to control the complex sourcing and contracting processes. By connecting the right people, processes, and information, companies can manage indirect sourcing in a simple, smart, and open way. Optimizing these processes can improve margins, cut costs, and reduce risk.
The SAP Ariba Source-to-Contract Suite provides a cloud-based solution for managing sourcing and suppliers. It aids in planning and executing sourcing strategies, managing the contract lifecycle, and includes advanced supplier selection and qualification features.
Procure-to-Order
SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing is a procurement solution designed to enhance visibility, cost control, and compliance throughout the procure to pay process. The platform offers a cloud-based, user-friendly purchasing application that ensures business buying aligns with policies while fostering collaboration with suppliers. With embedded AI capabilities, users are guided toward optimal purchasing decisions. The solution supports collaboration with trading partners through a vast business network, enhances accounts payable compliance via automated invoicing, and orchestrates processes smoothly even with multiple ERPs.
The solution provides several key benefits. It enables sustainable savings by ensuring compliance with contracts and supplier strategies, thereby realizing negotiated savings with every purchase. It also increases spend coverage by managing spending through tailored buying channels, rich catalog access, and real-time purchasing policy guidance. Furthermore, procurement efficiency is improved through seamless collaboration with trading partners, facilitating faster order fulfillment, efficient invoice processing, optimized discounts, and enhanced payment visibility.
Invoice-to-Pay
Automating accounts payable is essential for enhancing efficiency and ensuring compliance in today's integrated and collaborative buying and invoicing environment. By digitalizing and automating invoice management through a global business network, businesses gain visibility and efficiency, which allows them to capture more early-payment discounts and optimize working capital. The SAP Ariba Invoice Management solution simplifies the invoice-to-pay process, minimizing human intervention to achieve ok-to-pay status. This solution is deployed on the cloud and features automated invoice reconciliation and approval processes, supported by network-based business rules that ensure contractual and regulatory compliance. Moreover, it offers intuitive tools for collaborating on early-payment discounts.
The solution automates invoicing to deliver new savings, enabling faster processing of more invoices with minimal errors thanks to SAP Business AI and network-based rules. It also addresses compliance challenges worldwide by strengthening adherence to contracts and purchase orders while meeting global regulatory requirements across various countries and currencies. Additionally, it enhances user experiences, helping users make informed decisions with intuitive tools and workflows designed for best practices, and facilitates effective digital supplier collaboration.
Supplier Management and Collaboration
Building strong supplier relationships is crucial for creating resilient supply chains. Accessing a unified view of key supplier information allows businesses to effectively collaborate with suppliers and withstand disruptions. The SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance solution equips organizations with tools to streamline supplier management, enhancing buying decisions with intelligent controls.
It supports cloud-based deployment and integrates seamlessly with other SAP Ariba solutions. It offers a self-service portal for suppliers to maintain their information and provides customizable workflows for supplier qualification and segmentation.
By driving expenditure towards preferred suppliers, businesses can manage supplier relationships based on specific criteria and promote purchases from preferred sources. Enhanced visibility helps prevent savings loss, ensuring employees buy the right products at negotiated prices. Additionally, integrating with SAP Ariba solutions facilitates consistent supplier management and compliance across the supply base, from sourcing to payment.
Summary
SAP Business Suite efficiently automates the source to pay process, supporting businesses in every critical procurement step. From data-driven strategies and optimized supplier contracts to precise order value and streamlined payment processes, it ensures a cohesive procurement workflow. It also fosters effective supplier management and collaboration, contributing to improved procurement outcomes and business success.
End-to-End Benefits for CPOs
Procurement leaders can maximize procurement performance and realize their full potential with a suite that combines applications, data, and AI.
Evaluate where a company stands, and what steps should be taken to get ahead with Benchmarking. SAP makes this easier by regularly gathering and analyzing extensive benchmark data from hundreds of leading companies worldwide, then providing access to the information in a series of reports. For instance, when a business case needs to be built to support investment in procurement for digital transformation, a company can assess outcomes from source to pay solutions compared to other companies, or identify KPIs to improve their source to pay function. Based on benchmark surveys conducted over the past two years, the report covers the key metrics in procurement processes across the source to pay cycle. Results are presented as top, average, and bottom quartiles to indicate the degree of participant success. We also list best practices that elevate companies from an average level of performance or savings to best in class, offering insight into effective strategies can be used in an organization.
As shown in the figure below, implementing SAP Business Suite enables an overall procurement function to improve source-to-pay performance.
1. Based on Athena data