A strategic approach to sourcing goods and services is essential for meeting business needs and reducing costs across any organization. Strategic sourcing provides the greatest opportunity to impact the cost, quality, and performance of the supply chain and is one of the quickest paths to lower costs and higher revenue.
From identifying savings opportunities, to defining and executing supplier selection and negotiation, to managing supplier qualifications, the SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing solutions help drive sustainable results by automating and streamlining critical tasks across the sourcing process. And now with new guided sourcing capabilities, the process will be even easier for today’s busy procurement professionals.
With the new guided sourcing capabilities and revamped, state-of-the-art user experience (UX) available in the November 2020 release of SAP Ariba Sourcing, it will be easier and faster to create sourcing events. This improved usability will help increase adoption and generate even more savings in the all-important sourcing process. Additionally, the simplified, intuitive user experience will work to reduce the need for training and change management efforts, which in turn helps to lower the total cost of ownership of the solution while reducing the time required to effectively realize benefits.
With this release, SAP enriches the SAP Ariba Sourcing solution to provide comprehensive functionalty to source and negotiate across all direct and indirect spend categories in a fully integrated environment, leveraging the world’s largest digital business network, Ariba Network, where more than US$3.75 trillion in commerce is transacted annually.
Aligned with SAP’s strategy to become an experience company powered by the Intelligent Enterprise, guided sourcing incorporates the harmonized, next-generation user experience already adopted by other solutions within the source-to-pay suite. Additionally, SAP Enable Now is available with guided sourcing to provide additional in-application help and guidance, which can further increase productivity of sourcing professionals and other end users.
Key benefits of the new guided sourcing capabilities in SAP Ariba Sourcing include:
- In-app contextual guidance to reduce change management and drive user adoption
- In-app chat capabilities to improve collaboration between stakeholders and with suppliers
- Efficient management of supplier communication and information without having to switch between applications
- Simple, modern UX with embedded intelligence to improve the time required for sourcing RFx creation and awarding (compared with the legacy solution)
- New live feed of user-specific sourcing activity updates to keep users informed in real-time
Explore all that SAP Ariba Sourcing has to offer.
Drew Hofler is the vice president of Portfolio Marketing for SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass.
This story originally appeared on the SAP Ariba Newsroom.