Energy supplier

Ariba Guided Buying and Supplier Lifecycle & Performance relaunch

Project at a glance

Customer: European energy supplier

Specific project successes:

  • Provision of a self-service purchasing platform for all employees with an Amazon-like shopping experience (Ariba Guided Buying).
  • Compliance-secure approval process for requests + orders with strong process cost reduction
  • Compliance-secure onboarding process for new suppliers (qualification)
  • Digitalization of invoice receipt and further processing (eInvoicing)
  • Collaboration with suppliers via the world's largest B2B network, the Ariba Network
  • Complete digitization of operational procurement for indirect materials and services
  • Europe-wide rollout of the solution

 

Project description

After many years of intensive use of the SAP SRM purchasing platform and a new cloud-based IT strategy, the decision was made in 2018 to implement the market-leading eProcurement platform Ariba.

With SAP Ariba Guided Buying and SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle & Performance, the most pressing issues were to be

- Migration of the self-service purchasing platform for employees from SAP SRM to a new Amazon-like cloud solution -.

and an optimized, compliance-compliant onboarding process for new suppliers - were to be implemented throughout Europe.

The project focused on improving usability for the many thousands of employees involved in the procurement of C-items from supplier catalogs and a standardized qualification and approval process for new suppliers.

The challenges in the project consisted in harmonizing the grown processes and special functions and implementing them in a cloud solution. The courage to change processes and a modified, stringent requirements management close to the Ariba standard were the success factors for the successful implementation and introduction of the solution.

Project execution

The project was carried out according to the proven SAP Activate© implementation methodology for SAP cloud products. Based on standardized configuration templates, the requirements of the business unit were determined and recorded. The necessary specifications were made in dedicated decision workshops to enable rapid system configuration. In order to map an end-to-end business process, the existing SAP ERP systems were integrated with the Ariba cloud solution.

After intensive testing and approval of the system, the first group companies started pilot operation. After 2 months, the gradual rollout to the individual national companies began. By implementing an intensive training concept for key users and self-service help videos on the intranet for the vast majority of employees, the country rollouts were completed quickly. A strict template approach minimized the effort required for country-specific system configuration and customization.

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