Explaining SPM Reports

SAP Ariba provides a number of already configured reports, called Pre-packaged Reports. You can run those at any time, make changes and save your versions of those reports.​

In addition, you can create run custom reports, using a simple wizard. Again, you can save those reports for future use and share then with users across your organization. A report is based on a pivot table, but you can also view it as a table or a chart. You can even put those onto your dashboard for immediate access to critical information.​

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Now that you collected information on supplier performance, both at the detail level through questions on Surveys and at the KPI level through Scorecards, reporting provides a logical continuation, with the ability to review supplier, commodity and regional trends and incorporating other information to identify and monitor spend management strategies. ​

By leveraging performance and spend data, SPM provides a complete picture of supplier activity and allows decision-makers to gain comprehensive visibility to identify opportunities to improve supplier delivery in key performance areas. It provides actionable reports to analyze and track data from across the organization and ensures critical information is readily available to drive business decisions. ​

There are many types of reports, including quite a number of prepackaged reports that come with the system. These easy to use reports can be made available to all to analyze that data. The navigation panel on the dashboard provides several links related to reporting functionality. ​

You create an analytical report to investigate an aspect of your company’s data or business processes. During creation, you specify the source data by choosing the fact or facts you want to investigate and the measures that provide the information you want to build your report around. As analytical reports are based on the pivot table, you have the ability to add fields in different areas of the pivot table, such as rows, columns or page. An analytical report also allows you to set filters to limit the amount of data displayed in the report.​

A compound report allows you to view many different related charts and tables in a single umbrella report. In a compound report, you can see the pie chart of one report, the line chart of another, and the table view of a third. Compound reports can also contain summarized views, which combine individual fields from multiple reports. Filters on compound reports allow you to examine specific data across the different reports it contains.​

The diagram above summarizes how reports are generated. The process begins with the extraction of transactional data from various SAP Ariba solution data sources. This data is loaded into the reporting database. Users can then create analytical reports by arranging these collections of data. Dimensions loosely translates into attributes or header fields except that some of the attributes are expanded for further analysis. A date field, for example, will be expanded into day, month, quarter, year, fiscal day, month, quarter, year and finally, into the calendar date itself. ​

Measures are simply numeric values – money, numbers and integers. These are extracted into a pivot table. The pivot table can be used to manipulate the view of the data in a report or to generate a chart.​

The SAP Ariba Supplier Information and Performance Management solutions treat analytical reports exactly like any other document. You can add reports to projects, and organize them in folders. You can send reports for review and approval within a project. You can also add reports to the dashboard. When a user clicks the report either in the project or on the dashboard, the report is automatically regenerated with the most recent available data.​

Trending reports give you an overview of supplier performance over specific period of time. There are two prepackaged trending reports:​

• Supplier Performance Trending Report​
• Trending by Commodity​

The Supplier 360° is a compound report that provides a single view into a supplier. It consists of transactional application data and aggregated Reporting and Analysis data, and is visible to all users who have permission to use analytical reports. The Supplier 360° is located within Supplier Workspace, on the Reports tab. The 360° view displays supplier data derived from SAP Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba Contracts, SAP Ariba Supplier Information and Performance Management, and SAP Ariba Spend Analysis, including Recent Scorecards, Supplier Performance Trending Report, SPM Project List.​

Supplier 360° can be customized to meet your organization’s specific requirements.​