#WeMakeProcurementAwesome was the new tagline for this year’s rendition of AribaLive. A cool and very well executed event in its own right, hosted at the Marriot Auditorium Hotel outside Madrid, June 13-15.
It was not only about making good ‘ole procurement awesome. Make note of the hashtag leading that bold statement. It has to be done digitally. Getting everyone on boarded to the wonderful world of procurement. And that my friends, in the era of Digital Transformation, that according to SAPAriba is ‘da shit’.
The headlining theme of making procurement awesome followed the equations:
ADOPTION (compliant spend + happy users)^you & TRANSFORMATION (agility x opportunity)^innovation.
The first one is in essence to make procurement everybody’s business, by making the applications as intuitive, attractive and user friendly as we are used to when shopping on-line elsewhere. The engineering brain trust at SAPAriba is so sick of hearing “it should be just like Amazon” so they decided to do something about it. For real. And what they showcased in Madrid this year looks really promising.
Holding on to the Fiori design principles, primping the user interface on all devices (pc’s, tablets and phones) and leading the user through the buying transaction step-by-step with immediate access to subject matter experts at your fingertips, ready to chip in and help stuffing the shopping cart before checkout. Welcome to the wonderful world of Guided Buying. One of the delightful new additions to the P2P experience.
SAPAriba is serious about putting a lot of effort in making the user experience awesome. Not only for the occasional procurement user but also for the procurement professionals and suppliers. The whole point is to make the user interaction so pleasant and easy so the transformation to digital procurement (in the Ariba-Cloud) will happen practically by itself. No more enforcing compliance at the cost of obeying but unhappy users. It simply does not fit the new equation – “to the power of you”.
On the transformation note, SAPAriba CTO – Dinesh Shahane explains the need for agility – “what’s on Instagram today needs to be in our store tomorrow”. The ability to swiftly adapt to the ever changing environment. The technology trends driving the SAPAriba development agenda are:
- Hyper-connectivity. Everybody and everything connected everywhere all the time. For those of you who have sub teens and teenagers that’s old news.
- Big Data and deep learning. That is, making business sense out of all the readily available external data sources out there.
- Context aware user experience. Which is as far away from reading old-school, printed user manuals as you can get, but rather having access to the right kind of hints and help depending on where you are in the process (…enter the mandatory cost center here- ahhwww!).
So bring it on SAPAriba, it’s late but not too late. We like what we see, we share the vision and embrace the new developments.
Thanks to SAPAriba, Stretch customers and all others who contributed to #MakingThisEventAwesome
Signing off with my new favorite quote picked up from a Mainstage presentation:
Your business user is your new IT.