Introducing Events within SAP Ariba Guided Sourcing

In this course, you learn how to create a guided sourcing event within SAP Ariba Guided Sourcing. The lessons and units help project owners to confidently draft a new guided sourcing event in the user interface and publish it to the participants.

Within SAP Ariba guided sourcing, an "event" is the publication of data to suppliers or buyers and their responses to questions, bids on goods and services.

Events within SAP Ariba Sourcing include requests for information (RFI), proposals (RFP), and forward and reverse auctions.

Users who belong to the Category Buyer system group and one of the following system groups can create sourcing events:

• Category Manager
• Commodity Manager
• Customer Administrator
• Event Administrator
• Junior Procurement Agent
• Junior Sourcing Agent
• Limited Event Administrator
• Procurement Agent
• Sourcing Agent
• Sourcing Approver
• Sourcing Project Administrator

Guided sourcing provides a streamlined and intuitive user experience for creating and managing sourcing projects and events. It lets you and your suppliers communicate online and expedite the sourcing process.

SAP Ariba Guided Sourcing allows you to create and run events in which you exchange business information with other companies and offers benefits including:

• Online sourcing functionality
• Competitive bidding
• Advanced bid analysis

Through SAP Ariba Sourcing, sourcing professionals can engage the right people as team members to collaborate on creating RFIs, RFPs, and auctions. SAP Ariba Sourcing templates incorporate best practices for specific categories, regions, and business units. Buyers can choose from various features to incorporate into each sourcing project, controlling the bidding dynamics.

SAP Ariba Guided Sourcing provides a single-page interface to create events. You can create events on one screen to achieve faster adoption and improve satisfaction.

The SAP Companion provides tours, embedded tutorials, documentation, and other resources to guide users through key tasks in the system, providing contextual help tiles about capabilities within sections of the screen.

SAP Ariba guided sourcing also allows sourcing professionals to easily and quickly identify top suppliers across a wide range of categories and collect and analyze suppliers’ responses or bids. The integrated optimization tool supports faster award decisions.

A Single event is a "standalone" document created directly from the dashboard and can contain only one event with limited project management features. It serves as a one-time event, so when Single event is selected, the required field, Event type, appears. The values for this field include Request for Information (RFI), Request for Proposal (RFP), Reverse auction, and Forward auction.

Single event projects also have minimal process and workflow management components as they have fewer tasks than their full project counterparts. Single-event projects don't support phases and only support the following specific tasks: Approval for Publish, Approval for Award, and Approval for Team Grading. Single-event projects can contain documents only as items or attachments in the event.

A full project is a container for a sourcing event but adds process management functionality, such as the ability to assign tasks and collaboratively edit documents with your team members. A full project:

• Is a workspace that includes support for process management features, including document storage, phases, tasks, a message board, and project team.

• Is used to model different sourcing processes to provide consistency and visibility.

• Enables multiple users to collaborate on the same documents or events with defined roles and processes.

• Can contain multiple subprojects with events that share planning and savings tracking information.

When creating a full project, the Event Type field isn’t visible and is replaced with template questions.

Template questions are used as a standard practice within full project templates to make sections, tasks, and event documents visible. If a template uses questions, they appear directly below the template name upon selection.

There's a placeholder for the project owner to create an event in the form of a document choice. Project owners go to the Events and other documents section, and find the document with Choice in the Type column.

If a document choice isn't visible, specific events can be created within full projects from the Events and other documents section, under Create.

To see the list of electronic project documents available, where sourcing event can be found, select Document:

Single events serve as one-time events and require a value in the Event Type field.

Full projects contain more than one-time events, and event creation within a full project is commonly set from template questions upon creation.

Request for Information (RFI) is used to collect information about suppliers and their capabilities.

RFIs don't typically solicit pricing. Instead, RFIs generally contain questions to gather noncompetitive data, information, comments, or reactions from potential participants. RFIs usually precede other events like RFPs or auctions.

Request for Proposal (RFP): used to collect information about suppliers and price bids. The price may not be paramount when making an award.

To get pricing quotes from suppliers, create a Request for Proposal (RFP) or an auction event. RFPs generally contain items for which you want to collect pricing information, such as goods and services. RFPs can include questions to qualify participants, similar to RFIs.

Auctions are used to purchase goods or services. Price is the important factor.

• Reverse auctions (English reverse auctions)

  In a reverse auction, or English reverse auction, suppliers submit bids, offering progressively lower prices to outdo their competition and offer you the best price.

• Dutch auctions

  In a Dutch auction, prices automatically rise (for reverse auctions) or fall (for forward auctions) over time.

• Japanese auctions

  In a Japanese auction, participants must accept pricing at levels that automatically adjust at regular intervals to continue in the auction.

Guided sourcing also supports various options for you to handle bids and responses and for participants (suppliers) to submit bids. These options include:

• Sealed bids
• Envelope bidding
• Multiround bidding
• Multicurrency bidding
• E-mail bidding
• Alternate bidding
• Supplier-added items
• Custom offline response sheets

Forward Auction is used for the selling of goods or services.

In a forward auction, you want to sell rather than buy items. Instead of inviting suppliers to compete to offer you the lowest cost, you invite buyers to compete to offer you the highest price.

Note

We'll be covering primarily Reverse auction formats within this course.