Describing the SAP Ariba Contracts Lifecycle

SAP Ariba Contracts is an application that offers customers tools for the management of contracts. It leverages workspace functionality and the use of templates designed by administrators to ensure legal and business requirements are respected by contract creators.

A contract workspace (CW) is an SAP Ariba project used to store contracts online and includes information about the contract, contract documents, project team members, and tasks. Essentially, a contract workspace is a container for your agreements and the workflow behind them.

SAP Ariba Contracts supports the following contract workspace types:

• Contract Workspace (Procurement) - used for contracts with a supplier
• Contract Workspace (Sales) - used for contracts with a customer or buyer
• Contract Workspace (Internal) - used for contracts within companies or organizations

The main components of a Contract Workspace are Overview, Documents, Tasks, Team, Message Board, and History.

SAP Ariba Contracts allows you to manage the entire contract lifecycle in a centralized location. Here are the main steps:

1. Contract request: Initiates the contract process by creating and sending a request to a contract manager to create a contract workspace (CW).
2. Prepare a workspace and author a main agreement: In this step a contract manager creates a contract workspace in SAP Ariba and begins drafting/authoring the main agreement and other contract documents in preparation for review and negotiation.
3. Review and negotiate: In this step, contract documents go through an internal review process and then are sent out to a supplier for further redlines and negotiation.
4. Approve and finalize: In this step, contract documents go through final approvals and signatures are obtained. The workspace is then published and the contract executed.
5. Amend and manage: Finally, a contract may be amended and then further managed through dashboard tools, access controls and reporting.

Users with the appropriate system permissions can bypass the contract request creation step. They can create contract workspaces from an awarded sourcing event or directly from the SAP Ariba dashboard.