Running Prepackaged and Saved Reports

You run reports to analyze activity in your SAP Ariba solution.​

The types of reports you run, and the data you use, depend on the following factors:​

SAP Ariba has powerful tools that support strategic and operational reporting. The reports that are available to you in the realm’s reporting area depend on the solutions your company has purchased and the features you have permission to work with in those solutions. ​​

In the SAP Ariba application, there are three major locations for reports: Prepackaged Reports, Public Reports, and Personal Workspace. ​

• Prepackaged reports are basic reports created by SAP Ariba that are relatively generic.
• Public reports are custom reports created by your administrator and can be accessed by anyone with the proper permissions.
• A Personal Workspace is the virtual folder for all reports you have run yourself and that you have saved to your account.

The reports give you access to complex business information from multiple sources such as expense reports, purchase requisitions, sourcing events, contracts, and suppliers. They allow you to analyze buying and spending patterns for yourself, your department, or your entire organization.​​

Reports display data in a pivot table that you can manipulate to see different scenarios for the data. Pivot tables allow you to filter, slice, and drill down into the information to see patterns and relationships, summary information, and details at the same time. Before you run a report, you select basic filters and set advanced filter and display options to better focus the report results.

Before you run a report, you should consider what information you are trying to find. What is the goal of your query?  Running a report with more information and detail than you need will take longer to run. SAP Ariba reports allow you to look at the aggregated data or detailed information. 

Many managers use summary reports to make important business decisions. In these reports, data is usually rolled up or aggregated, by commodity, division, supplier, or some other way. These are considered analytical reports. Some dimensions and levels that are often used as rows in analytical reports are pre-aggregated and cached in the system, expediting the report run time.​

Analytical reports are often run in real time, and the results are interactive. While viewing the results, you can rearrange rows, columns, and page fields using the drag and drop method. You can even add new fields to the report or drill down to lower levels.

Detailed reports display transaction level reporting. For example, you can view individual invoice line items. As you might imagine, these reports can get extremely large. ​

In the detailed report example, the report is displaying a list of purchase orders and associated information. To see more information about a particular PO, you can choose its link, then select then select View More Details or View Supplier Detailsfrom the Actions menu pop-up.

Reporting needs may vary from company to company or organization to organization, but often there are some common reporting needs that most companies or organizations share. For example, most companies would like to see a breakdown of their spend by commodity, region, or supplier. To help increase the ease of reporting on this data, SAP Ariba has created a number of commonly-run reports known as prepackaged reports. ​

To access the prepackaged reports, from the dashboard choose Prepackaged Reports or choose Prepackaged Reports from the Common Actions area. Then expand or open the folder corresponding to your SAP Ariba solution. For this course, we will use reports covering several SAP Ariba solutions for demonstration purposes. The skills you learn today can be applied to reports in any folder. ​

Note that you can always create your own custom analytical report instead of using a prepackaged report. ​

Prepackaged reports are organized into subfolders related to SAP Ariba solution(s). If your organization has implemented these solutions, the applicable folder link is displayed and provides access to the reports. Some examples are shown below. If any prepackaged report is not quite what you were looking for, you can make a copy of it, modify the copy, and save it for future use. You cannot modify the original prepackaged report.

To learn more about the available prepackaged reports by solution, please review the Prepackaged Report Reference guide.​

A typical report displays measures inside the report, broken down by row fields. For each unique value of a row field, you get one row on the report. In this example, we see an order summary by cost center, where Cost Center is a row field.​

Column fields also break the measures into separate groups per unique value of the column field, but the report displays one column for each. In the example, Ordered Date (Year) is the column field and gives us two columns: one for 2015 and one for 2016.​

Page fields act as filters. You can expand the page fields by choosing the arrow and filtering the report by any of the values displayed. Page fields can also easily be dragged onto the report as a row or column field.

Measures are the data points that are displayed as quantifiable amounts in the pivot table. They are part of every report as the actual numbers that provide information on the selected categories. ​

• Measures are numerical data or calculations/aggregations of that data​
• Amounts​
  • Spend Amount, Estimated Savings Amount, Total Contract Spend, Purchase Order Spend, Received Amount​
• Counts​
  • Workspace Count, Project Count, Invoice Count, Exception Count

The pivot grid layout displays report data with grid lines to provide a clearer connection between individual rows and their subtotals and totals by displaying each hierarchy and level as a separate column and dividing different sections of the table with lines. It is useful for reports that have numerous row fields or display multiple hierarchy levels on rows or columns.​

To return to the pivot table, choose Pivot Grid and select Pivot Outline from the menu. ​

A report might use the pivot grid or the pivot outline as the default layout option for displaying reports on the pivot table, depending on the purpose of the report and the kind of data it displays. Remember that you have the option to change the view to your own preference.

Your view of SAP Ariba solutions data in reports depends on your role and site permissions.

• Prepackaged Reports​
  • Depends on system permission and data you report on​
• Personal Workspace
  • ​Only you see reports
• ​Public Reports
  • ​Share reports with all users
  • ​Share reports with members of a group by editing the report attributes
• ​Projects
  • ​Project owner can control which individual users or groups see the reports using the project Access Control settings