Solutions

ERP and CRM systems are great, but they don't do much to improve interactions between businesses. For all your investments in technology, your B2B transactions are still managed with a fragmented array of applications and manual processes, blocking your view, keeping costs and risks high, and hobbling your competitiveness.

You need technology that makes trading partner collaboration easier and more efficient because in a volatile global marketplace where businesses rise and fall every day, sustainable competitive advantage requires strong, mutually beneficial relationships.

You'll find it in the Ariba Commerce Cloud. With just your web browser and a user-friendly interface, you can work with your trading partners using market-leading SaaS solutions for spend management, collaborative finance management, and sales acceleration management – all integrated on a single platform.

These solutions are available by subscription and on-demand, so there's no software to install or maintain. They're scalable, cost-effective, and burden-free. They're also easily integrated with your ERP and back office systems. All it takes to extend your processes to more trading partners is plugging into the Cloud. And no worries, Ariba systems are thoroughly tested to ensure continuous, secure, and reliable service delivery.

You can be up and running in no time, using the industry's most complete platform to efficiently and effectively locate, communicate, and collaborate with your trading partners. Commerce is simply better with Ariba technology, whether you're looking to drive sales, control spending, or manage cash.

Spend Management aligns organizations, processes, and systems to analyze, source, contract, procure, pay, manage and continuously improve global supply for best-value performance in support of the strategic objectives of the business. It provides the single greatest opportunity for your company to control supply costs, improve performance, and manage risks. We help customers achieve drastic cost reduction at a rapid pace where they start accruing bottom line savings in a matter of weeks instead of months. An equally important benefit to the firms has been achieving complete business transparency, productivity and contract/ policy compliance in the area of Sourcing and Procurement, thereby boosting investor confidence and assuring the supplier community of fair business practices.

With 1000+ customers across industries (including half of Fortune 1000 companies), the savings generated were USD 30 BN over the last year. The solution comprises of:

Spend Analysis

• Internal Visibility provides granular commodity codes so you have improved visibility into what you are buying.
• Supplier Visibility, based on our 150M+ global database updated by Dun & Bradstreet and other sources, provides a number of enrichment attributes delivering critical details about your supply base.
• Market Visibility consists of industry and proprietary sourcing market information allowing you to make more informed strategic sourcing decision.

Sourcing

• Develop Strategy - Identify savings opportunities, assess market dynamics, and develop an informed sourcing strategy.
• Source and Negotiate - Identify and qualify suppliers, negotiate best-value agreements, derive the optimal award allocation, and drive project collaboration, process standardization, and knowledge management across the sourcing lifecycle.
• Monitor and Manage - Quickly implement supplier agreements, track and realize savings, and manage supplier performance.

Contract Management

• Collaborative Contract Creation and Authoring - Streamline contract initiation and collaborative authoring, negotiations, and approval. Use pre-approved templates and legal clauses to minimize risks and ensure consistency. Native integration into Microsoft Word maximizes adoption and compliance and ensures audit ability across the contracting cycle. In addition, full electronic signature capabilities are available through tight integration with eSignature provider DocuSign.
• Comprehensive Contract Repository - Empower stakeholders to easily search contracts, clauses, and other documents across a comprehensive repository of contracts, certifications, and related documents.
• Contract Compliance and Performance Management - Automated tracking and reporting enforce price, T&Cs, discounts, SLAs, & time-frames, ensuring that your company is maximizing contract compliance and value while meeting regulatory and reporting requirements.

Procurement

• Search and Compare - Simplified cataloging, the world's largest supplier network, and advanced punch-out capabilities empower your employees to quickly locate the right suppliers, goods, and services they need to meet their business needs.
• Request and Approve - A walk-up user interface guides users through the requisitioning process, ensuring purchase requests are accurate and complete. Advanced routing ensures proper management and budget holder review, escalations, and approval. And Automated checks ensure appropriate contract terms, volume breaks, and pricing discounts are applied to every purchase.
• Receive and Pay - Round out the purchase cycle with flexible automated, partial, negative and amount-based receiving by commodity. Ensure accurate payment with automated line-item reconciliation, PO-flip functionality, automated invoicing and payment, and support for P-card ordering and reconciliation.

Invoice & Payment

• Eliminate AP Touch - Eliminate most costs receiving invoices via direct integration with your back-end systems and automating nearly every step in the invoice-to-payment process.
• Auto-Post and Auto-Reject Invoices - Leverage straight-through processing driven by intelligent workflow that eliminates the number of errors that need to be rejected and posts accurate invoices automatically.
• Automatically Validate All Invoices - Reliably validate invoices down to the line level so only accurate invoices get accrued.
• Eliminate Supplier Inquiries - Enable your suppliers to check payment status and investigate blocked invoices themselves using self-service functionality.
• Maximize Supplier Participation - Achieve 100 percent supplier participation by eliminating technical barriers.
• Gain Visibility and Control - Automatically consolidate and reconcile orders, invoices, payments, and related key documents, and gain full visibility and control over processes and activities.

Supplier Management

• Supplier Portal and Profile Management - Empower suppliers to self-register and manage their own profiles, certifications, and other documentation that are critical to giving you a holistic view of your suppliers' capabilities.
• Approval and Onboarding - Automatically route supplier information to key stakeholders for review and approval, with escalations, notifications, and full audit ability.
• Integrated Supplier Network Discovery and Assessments - Augment your internal analysis with access to more than 250,000 supplier profiles, ratings, and assessment information from the Supplier Network.
• Vendor Master Integration and Enrichment - Simplify integration with existing vendor masters and auto-enrich supplier data with diversity, parent-child, risk, and other business information.
• Supplier Information Management - Systematically track key information, certifications, insurance documentations, and other milestones to proactively mitigate risks and ensure the most holistic and up-to-date view of your suppliers.
• Performance Measurement, Analytics, and Reporting - Track and analyze qualitative and quantitative supplier performance data in a comprehensive scorecard. Set alerts for early detection of lagging performance or issues that require quick resolution or improvement.
• Corrective Action and Improvement Plan Management - Establish and monitor progress of collaborative corrective action and improvement plans to ensure optimal supplier performance. Leverage best-practice templates and formulas for supplier performance, risk, sustainability, and corrective action plan management.
• Supplier Management Services - Access the unique portfolio of services to streamline and manage supplier on-boarding, performance, and risk management. And leverage the global services for supplier site assessment, qualification, and on-boarding.