"My team is looking to store frequently used documents and other information in SAP Ariba Sourcing. We want to ensure our buyers have all relevant information at hand whenever they are creating a project. Ideally, the right data would be available to them depending on the focus on the project they create."
"You can do that with a Knowledge Project in SAP Ariba Sourcing. These are projects designed to contain documents with general knowledge about your company and your company's processes that you want to access or reuse. When users work on a project, SAP Ariba can display links to documents from knowledge projects. You can use knowledge project features, such as keywords, to control which links are shown depending on project fields, task phases and tasks."
"This seems exactly what we need. Our administrators can build the knowledge projects. Do users need special permissions to access information coming from a knowledge project?"
"Knowledge Projects are created the same way as other projects, but a different template is used. Keywords and subscriptions are used to display what is needed."
Prerequisites
Users do not need to be able to view or create Knowledge Projects to take advantage of the knowledge itself. Depending on your configuration, users see the document links in the Related Knowledge area to the left of the project’s tabs or on a Task Details screen.
Step 1: Steps
- On the SAP Ariba dashboard, click Create > Knowledge Project. SAP Ariba Sourcing opens a Create Knowledge Project page.
- Enter information for the type of knowledge you are archiving. Select values for Commodity, Regions and Departments for project level matching.
- Click Create.
Step 2: Project matching
SAP Ariba Sourcing displays links to documents from knowledge projects in a non-knowledge project when the knowledge project and non-knowledge project match at the project level. A knowledge project includes the following fields used for project matching:
- Commodity
- Regions
- Departments
Step 3: Document matching
If the projects match, SAP Ariba checks to see if a document in the knowledge project matches criteria specified in the project you are working on. The criteria can be:
- Keyword matching for the current phase
- A direct link from a task to a Knowledge Project document
- A knowledge document with the ALL keyword
Step 4: Document Matching Examples
For links to knowledge project content to appear in a project or task details, the projects must first match at the project level. If this requirement is met, SAP Ariba then checks to see if a document in the knowledge project matches criteria for keywords in the phase or a direct link in a task.
The below table lists several examples of when a non-knowledge project and a knowledge project match.
Viewing information
The links that display are generated dynamically based on what is being viewed in the user interface, whether it is a particular phase of a project, or a specific document.
When the project is being viewed, the system looks at the current phase of the project and displays the knowledge links that are appropriate for that particular project and phase. This is configured with keywords.
Because space is limited, only 4 projects and 6 published documents are displayed in the Related Knowledge area. There is no limit to the number of documents or projects you can list as Related Knowledge for a specific area of a project. Additional documents are shown on a separate page, and can be accessed by clicking Search Knowledge.
The most relevant information appears at the top of the Related Knowledge area. For example, if your project pertains to China, knowledge specific to China appears at the top, followed by knowledge for APAC and then generic knowledge.