Discussing SAP Ariba Solution Portfolio and Guided Buying Features

The video will guide you on how to use the live training systems to practice what you’ve learned in this course.

This image shows the full suite of SAP Ariba solutions available.

This image highlights the solutions that we will be covering in this course.

User-friendly purchasing of goods and services

SAP Ariba Buying makes shopping for the things you need for work as easy as shopping for the things you need outside of work with an intuitive interface and standard eCommerce look and feel.

• Support the entire Procure to pay process with seamless connection
• Intuitive UI
• Flexible and robust workflow engine
• AP automation and Compliance with touchless invoicing and 3 way match against POs, Receipts, and Invoices
• Seamless integration with ERP systems for Payment processing
• Dashboard and Analytics to provide real time visibility into spend

SAP Ariba buying simplifies the process of purchasing, making it easy to learn and use with an intuitive user interface.

The solution features workflows that can be customized to accommodate your companies purchasing policies and automation to streamline compliance.

The system is designed to integrate seamlessly with ERP and other external systems and also features a dashboard with analytics for spend visibility.

SAP Ariba Buying’s guided buying capability allows non-procurement professionals a single place to search for goods and services, making purchases with little to no involvement from the procurement department.

Guided buying captures organization's purchasing policies and uses them to guide casual users and functional buyers to the appropriate buying channels. Users know right away when a policy is violated, rather than finding out after submitting a request.

SAP Ariba’s Guided Buying solution is built for non procurement professionals and enforces your company's business policies and processes to reduce the need for procurement agents to touch each and every transaction.

Users are guided through the purchasing process to the appropriate channels with policies that allow them to be warned and given additional guidance if they are violating.

Approvers can be added to the documents when violations occur or submission of documents with violations can be prevented.

SAP Ariba Buying’s guided buying capability allows non-procurement professionals a single place to search for goods and services, making purchases with little to no involvement from the procurement department.

Guided buying captures organization's purchasing policies and uses them to guide casual users and functional buyers to the appropriate buying channels. Users know right away when a policy is violated, rather than finding out after submitting a request.

SAP Ariba Guided Buying was built for casual, non procurement professionals as a tool to guide them through the purchasing process without the need for extensive assistance from procurement agents or administrators.

The solution is configured according to your company's processes and uses them to steer casual users to the correct place and to enforce company policies with warnings when violations occur.

• SAP Ariba’s guided buying capability provides end users that are not in your professional procurement group a streamlined user interface. Guided buying leads users through step by step processes to search for goods and services, easily make purchases, and accomplish other common tasks.
• Procurement administrators can create custom help content for scenarios where users need additional guidance. Guided buying follows the same procurement processes as SAP Ariba Procurement solutions. Validation ensures users follow procurement policies with custom feedback to assist users with correcting errors.
• Guided buying is not a replacement for SAP Ariba Procurement solutions. Procurement professionals still must use SAP Ariba Procurement solutions for specific procurement functionalities like demand aggregation, collaborative requisitioning, complex services procurement, invoice reconciliation, and advanced payments.
• Not all features of SAP Ariba Procurement solutions are used in guided buying.

SAP Ariba Guided Buying features also include:

• Common Design Principles
• One central "landing page" to cover all buying channels
• Multiple solutions and buying processes can be integrated (e.g. Concur, Fieldglass etc.)
• Seamlessly leverage the capabilities of the entire SAP Ariba suite, such as preferred suppliers from SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle Management, and simple quotes through SAP Ariba Sourcing
• Custom Forms to configure specific requests
• Support Service requests for simple and complex services
• Policies to pro-actively drive compliance

Non procurement professionals use SAP Ariba Guided Buying to access a streamlined user interface with a central landing page that will direct them to various buying channels.

Tiles on the landing page can link to custom forms or other SAP products like Concur and Fieldglass.

They can also link to other SAP Ariba solutions like Strategic Sourcing, Contracts or Supplier Lifecycle Management.

Guided Buying works together with the full procurement solution. Procurement professionals and administrators will still access the full SAP Ariba procurement solution to use specific features like demand aggregation and to address more complex tasks like invoice reconciliation or advanced payments.

SAP Ariba Invoice management is a powerful solution that enables organizations to reconcile and pay invoices quickly and easily.

Invoicing professionals can leverage powerful automation validation and approvals to ensure invoice compliance with company policies and to reduce the need for tedious processing.

Reconcile and pay invoices with minimal manual effort.

SAP Ariba Invoicing provides straight-through and streamlined invoice approval processes, helping organizations focus less on transactions and more on enhancing cash and working capital.

• Support PO, Non-PO, Contracts and Services based invoicing
• 100% e-invoicing from Day 1
• Touchless processing
• Exception handling and approval
• Reduce compliance and supplier risk
• Improve cash management

The Marketplace for Modern Business, Creating Simple, Intelligent Exchanges between Millions of Buyers and Suppliers.

The SAP Ariba network is a world leading cloud marketplace that connects over 5 million companies and supports upwards of $3 trillion of transactions each year.

Collaborate on business commerce for direct and indirect goods and services.

The Ariba Network is open to trading partners all around the world with support for 24 different languages. Automation and customization allow complex configuration of company policies.

Implementing the AN is designed to be simple and gives you access to transact with over 5.5 million companies.

The image provides a high-level overview of the SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing.

This process will be broken down and covered in more detail throughout this course.

The buying process begins when a user adds items to their shopping cart, enters any required information on the requisition, and submits the request for approval.

Once approved by all required approvers, the requisition is used to generate a purchase order or PO which is sent to the supplier via the Ariba network and a copy is also sent to S/4HANA or other ERP system.

Changes or cancellations to orders can be submitted and processed through these same channels.

Suppliers can send back PO confirmations or ship notices to provide information on the order, such as how many items have been accepted, rejected, back ordered, or shipped.

Once the ordered items are shipped to their location, the requester or other user submits a goods receipt to track how many items were received.

Suppliers then submit invoices to charge for the ordered items. The quantities, amounts, taxes and other data on the invoice don't always necessarily match exactly what was ordered or received.

To address this, an invoice reconciliation document is used to handle any discrepancies that may exist.

Once the invoice reconciliation document is reconciled and approved, it sends a payment request to S/4HANA or other ERP system to initiate payment to the supplier.

The payment information referred to as Remittance Advice can be imported back into SAP Ariba for visibility and status updates.

SAP Ariba procurement is built to integrate directly with other SAP Ariba products but also with S/4HANA or other ERP systems.

Data, typically in the form of CSV. Flat files can be sent to and from these systems via the Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway, Web Services, Direct Connectivity, or File Channel Transfer.

With an integrated, dynamic approval flow and extensible, flexible approval rules, the SAP Ariba Procurement solution allows accurate modeling of complex business processes. With the availability of email and mobile approval, the SAP Ariba Procurement Solution is designed to adapt to an organization's changing business requirements.

Approval rules specify which employees are asked to approve a document, such as a purchase requisition. Your organization can use the default rules or it can create custom ones.

Requisitions, receipts, invoices, custom forms, and other documents can be made to go through an approval process.

A unique approval process can be set up for each approvable document type that allows for customizable routing to one or more users or groups.

The approval flow in each document will display the users or groups assigned to a document in the order they will approve and will also provide a tooltip to let users know why they are required to approve the document.

Custom forms can be built into SAP Ariba Procurement to accommodate processes that might fall outside of the standard requisitioning process.

These custom forms can be placed on landing pages and can be configured to go through a customized approval process.

• Custom Forms can be created by admins for non-standard processes
• Custom Form Approval Processes may apply
• Forms can be added to Guided Buying landing pages for quick access

The Custom Form User Interface (UI) appearance can be configured to support capturing new data for approvals, searching, and reporting. Fields can be rearranged and renamed. You can also make fields conditional, making them validate the data entered, appear only under certain conditions, or editable only under specific circumstances.

Examples of eForms are:

• Contract provisions
• Certificates of liability
• Product data sheets
• Vendor add/change request
• Deal sheets
• Incident forms
• Asset tracking forms
• Capital purchase authorizations

SAP Ariba features powerful reporting tools that make it easy to run reports and gain visibility into spend patterns or other metrics.

Reports can be run in the system on demand or can be scheduled to run on a recurring basis. Reports can also be exported in CSV format, allowing for external review.

• SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing contains powerful built in Reporting tools
• Reports can be run immediately or on a schedule
• Reports can be exported to .CSV or Excel

In the guided buying user interface, clicking your name or initials in the top right-hand corner of the screen will open the user preferences menu.

Users can access options here to change their profile information, set their time zone and language via the Locale edit notification preferences, delegate approval authority, and activate or deactivate the SAP Ariba mobile app.