SAP ARIBA CATEGORY MANAGEMENT

Ideally, purchasing organisations should be able to focus more on strategic and innovative matters these days and make a noticeable contribution to value creation in their own business. Unfortunately, reality is somewhat different in many companies:

• Buyers are continually firefighting instead of having time to devote to strategic matters.
• Spend, supplier and market data are spread across various systems and individuals’ heads, not always accessible, and organised in different, inconsistent taxonomies.
• It is very difficult to manage the number of suppliers and transactions strategically using standard tools such as PowerPoint and Excel.
• It is often impossible to keep track of the implementation of initiatives defined in the course of the strategy development.
• While a general framework for the creation of category strategies may exist, it is often highly heterogeneous. The consequences:
  • Category teams from different countries do not communicate coherently.
  • Buy-in from senior management is lacking because the executives cannot follow the inconsistently constructed strategies.

SAP Ariba Category Management counters all these challenges.

What is SAP Ariba Category Management?

SAP Ariba Category Management is a toolkit that will help you set up an intelligent and standardised plan-to-strategy process. By implementing a consistent process across all categories many stakeholders will have tangible benefits:

Procurement will thus generate added values in the company and is actively driving their agenda with the objective of aligning business goals and requirements with market supply.

SAP Ariba Category Management is based on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and is thus easily integrated with other SAP systems (such as SAP Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba Spend Analysis) and non-SAP systems.

Which businesses can benefit from SAP Ariba Category Management?

Like many other SAP solutions, SAP Ariba Category Management is aimed at businesses of a certain size. The presence of SAP Ariba Sourcing is of advantage for implementing the solution, but not a prerequisite.

One additional aspect to consider is the maturity level of your procurement organisation. We will gladly help you determine this with our Next-Gen Readiness Assessment. Get in touch with our expert Tobias Klein (contact details further down on this page) or find out how we support customers with increasing their level of maturity through our Business Transformation Services.

Which functions does SAP Ariba Category Management comprise?

SAP Ariba Category Management is a set of over 25 tools arranged in three phases:

As already mentioned, SAP Ariba Category Management is based on the SAP BTP, which facilitates integration with SAP and third-party tools. Market data can be collected from external sources, such as Beroe, and users will automatically receive suggestions for opportunities, based on AI.

Which benefits does SAP Ariba Category Management provide to users?

• Efficiency and simplicity: Create category strategies quickly and easily, along a guided and consistent process - using a digital toolkit with best practices from category and market analyses!
• Tangible sustainability and innovation goals: Combine data on spend, suppliers, business needs and market dynamics to set tangible sustainability and innovation targets and derive corresponding initiatives!
• Transparent alignment of procurement and business goals: Gain real-time insights into measurable targets and initiatives and effectively counteract when needed!
• Global, cross-functional collaboration: Develop your strategies in all regions and implement them efficiently by assembling your teams cross-functionally and managing stakeholders centrally!
• Category intelligence: Get real-time recommendations to help you achieve your category goals - from third-party feeds, such as Beroe, and machine learning algorithms!
• Single source of truth: SAP Ariba Category Management is embedded in the SAP ecosystem. Contextual spend data is combined with supplier and contract information as well as sourcing events in one central location. This allows category managers to intervene proactively if targets are jeopardised.

Why is apsolut your ideal partner for the implementation of SAP Ariba Category Management?

• We are the technological innovation engine in SAP-based procurement: We acted as pioneers for SAP SRM, SAP Ariba and the SAP Product Sourcing Suite. And now, we are once again providing pioneering consulting services for this state-of-the-art Category Management toolkit.
• We are the SAP architects: Thanks to our in-depth expertise in the area of SAP BTP, we understand your architecture and know how to integrate new solutions into existing landscapes.
• We will provide training in the use of the key tools provided by SAP Ariba Category Management, such as the Kraljic matrix and Porter's five forces analysis.
• We are the data experts: We know a variety of data tools, such as SAP Ariba Spend Analysis, Tableau, PowerBI and Spendscape (formerly Orpheus), and will integrate them with your processes.
• We speak the buyers’ language: We will thus realise projects in collaboration with you as partners, making sure to reconcile your company’s requirements with market conditions.