Procurement, Ariba

Ariba Live 2017 – What’s next?

The SAP Ariba Live tour has finally arrived to Europe and this year the conference will take place in the beautiful city of Prague, capital of Czech Republic. The conference will take place for three days and the expectations are high.

I know that it will be busy days packed with interesting speakers, breakout sessions and the opportunity to network with interesting people where the one thing we all have in common is to #makeprocurementawesome.
Busy but interesting and fun!

What am I expecting out of these three days?

Well, except for the opportunity to meet and discuss procurement with likeminded professionals, I would also like to hear more about the latest and greatest within the SAP Ariba solutions. In addition, I am curious about best-practices from the SAP Ariba experts of how to transform procurement to a successful part of the business in combination with demonstrations of the solutions.

What else falls under the category ‘latest and greatest’?

I think Guided Buying is a good candidate. Guided Buying was introduced last year to transform the user experience by guiding casual users to the right items and preferred suppliers. I believe that this is something that a lot of users will find very useful and will make the buying process easier and much smoother. What would the next step be in this innovation? I believe that the users will always seek for an easier procurement and sourcing processes and therefore I’m very excited to hear and learn more about the coming capabilities within Guided Buying.

There are three components that will help to fulfill the slogan #makeprocurementawesome: security, integration and analytics. By combining these three components it will help the business to get more out of the SAP Ariba solutions and maximizing the value of the implementations.

How?

For instance, by using the new module Supplier Risk, Ariba will help the buyers to manage risks within their supplier base and thereby procurement will be able to influence the bottom line.
There is a lot of buzz around transforming procurement, but what does it actually mean to transform procurement as a business function?
I believe that the innovations that SAP Ariba bring such as Guided Buying, Supplier Risk and Supplier Lifecycle Management in combination with integrations (both standard as well as using open API’s) will enable Procurement to help the business achieving their goals.

Looking forward to see you during these days in Prague!

Read about our skilled Ariba-specialists here.

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