SAP Ariba Procurement Reviews

What I find best about SAP Ariba Procurement is the ease of connecting contracts, POs, and the procurement part, which is most useful. It is not just usable as a standalone; the connection of the whole system has been more useful over the years.

SAP Ariba Procurement is worth the money as a tool because it connects all departments in one. It functions similarly to Salesforce where you can plug in and out different components.

Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement.

When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching.

The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

I have been using SAP Ariba Procurement for about a couple of years since my first experience in 2011, which was simpler, with a company in Leeds, specifically in Castleford. Then I used it for a couple of years with several Council, and now since 2023, I have been trying to implement it with Gloucestershire County Council.

When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching.

The scalability of SAP Ariba Procurement is strong, as it is easy to adjust between big or small implementations because it is all about licensing.

Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement.

Their support rating really depends on the instance. We have had instances where it was a two, and instances where it was a ten, so I would rate it at a mid-range six.

Neutral

The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement depends on the implementation partner. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for one of the councils I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

SAP Ariba Procurement is overall an easy tool to use, but you need to have training because while it is user-friendly, the choices are not obvious. It is all about understanding how it works—you need a helping hand to start with, and then you can take over.

I would recommend SAP Ariba Procurement to other people. You need a lot of time to get it set up, but once it starts flowing, it is 99.9% effective. You may struggle with support, but they are changing a few things, so it should be fixed. Additionally, it has many benefits, as it can help your suppliers as much as you. Because we are a public organization, the supplier accounts are free for the suppliers.

Regarding pricing, I have only purchased it via tenders because I work for the public sector. They are among the expensive options in the market like Oracle and Salesforce

My overall rating for SAP Ariba Procurement is 8 out of 10.

I am a customer of this tool, and I use SAP Ariba Procurement for my regular procurement roles. This software is used for my job, which I do at work.

My usual use cases for SAP Ariba Procurement are specific to procurement.

I use SAP Ariba Procurement, as part of SAP Procurement, for end-to-end RFx process management. That starts with the RFI stage, where it involves spend analysis, understanding the business needs, and getting the respective data from the stakeholders. I use the Ariba platform to get into the RFI stage. That involves formulating the RFI with specific requirements that we have and requesting certain details that are very important for us to understand the capability of the suppliers, the range of products they can offer, and the technical capabilities they have.

As part of the same RFx process, we then have this RFP and RFQ stage. In that stage, we evaluate the suppliers and get all the respective data from the system on the capability of suppliers they have, how they have performed in the past on different parameters such as quality, cost, and delivery, what are the various risks involved with onboarding such suppliers, and evaluating the supplier on the risk matrix. The RFQ process helps us get the quotation from the suppliers and benchmark the same against the rates supplied by different suppliers. If needed, we can have dynamic bidding to negotiate the rates to award the business to the suppliers.

For me, the most valuable feature of SAP Ariba Procurement is reverse auction, which helps us with price discovery in the market. After analyzing the quotes we have from suppliers, we found that many times there's a big gap in the rate we are paying and the benchmarking rate that is there in the market. The use of SAP Ariba Procurement platform for dynamic price bidding has been one of the best solutions that have been used by us.

We use SAP Ariba Procurement's data analytics feature. It mostly helps us with slicing and dicing of the data, making the spend analysis more customer-friendly. That helps us to make decisions on the different contracts that can be simplified and that can be easily used for giving us the best cost and the best service to be provided, and also integration of service levels in that.

The spend analytics platform gives us visibility on the way spend is organized among different categories, different regions, and different subcategories. It shows how we can consolidate buying in certain cases, and in addition to that, how we can leverage our spend data so that cost savings can be utilized and we can maximize the benefits that have been offered as part of the analytics solution.

SAP Ariba Procurement has impacted my organization in many important ways that have been prolonged benefits. The top three benefits I see are that there has been a lot of trust in suppliers post this implementation. It builds transparency in the system. Supplier key performance indicators, those which are evaluated through the supplier scorecard, are easily and readily available and visible in the system. The supplier and the customer are quite aware of the way supplier performance is moving over the period of time. It has also helped us to bring many cost-saving opportunities that have led to actual deliverable savings of 5% to 8% for us. Supplier performance has also improved over a period of time.

At the moment, I don't have any specific reasons for improvement areas in SAP Ariba Procurement. The main improvement could be integrating the Ariba platform with the SAP Supplier Relationship module. That would help the supplier to have a better understanding of how Ariba works and how they can be beneficial in that regard, and they can leverage the same with their own suppliers.

I have been working with SAP Ariba Procurement for almost five years.

My opinion on the stability and reliability of SAP Ariba Procurement is quite positive; it has been stable and reliable for the business to perform on a regular basis. We have not experienced any business discontinuity happening because of the platform, and it has been a really good experience for us.

I have not noticed any downtime or outages with SAP Ariba Procurement. It has been a while since we have had that.

SAP Ariba Procurement has been scalable for us so far. We were able to implement the platform for our big range of suppliers, which are more than 500 suppliers implemented seamlessly. Value-wise, there have been a couple of million dollars in transactions that happen month over month.

SAP Ariba Procurement has been adaptable to our growing needs, and we could find it extendable with the growing demand that we have in the business, allowing us to extend it over a couple of extra suppliers too.

I do not often communicate with the technical support for SAP Ariba Procurement, as that is done by another team. I'm not directly responsible for getting in touch with the technical support team to get any queries resolved.

Negative

Before SAP Ariba Procurement, I mostly used a manual system, working on Excel, email, and using file-based systems for this process.

I participated in the initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement where the platform was integrated with SAP. I was involved in that process.

During the initial setup process of SAP Ariba Procurement, there were a couple of challenges integrating the same system on our SAP platform. We faced critical software bugs that were present during the implementation phase, and we had to extend our implementation for a couple of months. It delayed the whole process, but after a couple of months, we were able to seamlessly integrate the same into our system, and it was seamless after that.

Before choosing SAP Ariba Procurement, we moved directly to Ariba since SAP was aligned with it.

In managing supplier relationships and mitigating risks, SAP Ariba Procurement has a very strong role to play. It gives us various options that help us to build relationships with suppliers. In case of any discrepancy or emergency situation, we have to ensure that we have enough alternatives so that we don't get held up in achieving the supplier supply efficiency in the system.

We also use SAP Ariba Procurement for the supplier scorecard and ensuring that supplier performance is reviewed very stringently so that all the KPIs are within the range we expect. The transparency it brings in the system makes the supplier relationship healthy over the long term.

SAP Ariba Procurement's automated purchasing has helped reduce errors for me. In the case of various invoice processing, the main challenge has been many times on the rate part. The rate that has been maintained and settled with the supplier on the contract is many times different from the rate that has been updated in the system or the vendor is using for the invoicing purpose. We created an automated mechanism where on a certain frequency, the contract rate and the actual system rate is getting reviewed so that the same error can be avoided when the actual invoicing happens.

I do not utilize SAP Ariba Procurement's guided buying feature or any documentation for the solution. I am not much aware of the pricing and licensing of SAP Ariba Procurement. I believe that when there's an initiative to make the Ariba platform on the cloud, that will definitely help us to reduce and make the cost quite competitive so that the same can be reciprocated across multiple organizations and it creates a healthy environment for anyone to start using the platform.

Based on my experience with SAP Ariba Procurement, I rate this solution 8 out of 10.

My use cases mainly involve using SAP Ariba Procurement for sourcing and contracting, running RFPs, RFIs, processing the contracts through all approvals, reviews, and signatures. I'm currently doing a full redesign, rebuild, and reimplementation of contracts, and I've just rolled out Guided Sourcing to basically the global organization.

The best thing about SAP Ariba Procurement, in comparison to a lot of its competitors, is that if the company has someone who knows how to configure it, they can do a lot of the process building themselves. In my last company, we used Icertis, and if you wanted any configuration done in it, you had to get Icertis themselves to do it, losing control over how you designed and implemented changes into the process and system.

Whereas in SAP Ariba Procurement, if you've got someone who knows the system and you can give them the admin rights, you can build whatever processes you want. The only thing you really need SAP Ariba Procurement for is if you need extra metadata fields; you need them to add in the metadata fields, but then the rest of it you can do yourself. Most of its competitors don't offer that level of configurability, making you reliant on a third-party organization for any configuration changes. Additionally, it's actually priced lower than many competitors because, technology-wise, it might not be as advanced, but it's priced accordingly.

There's always room for improvement in SAP Ariba Procurement. On the sourcing, it could be easier to import the documents you want, so if you want items to be bid on, it could be a bit easier to import that from a spreadsheet. It's currently not the most user-friendly of processes.

On the contracts, I can't think of anything that needs improvement. If you're just using it to manage a process flow for a draft contract, it's perfectly adequate. One thing that could be improved is the way you interact with the supplier; if you draft a contract, unless you have contract authoring, which has its own problems, you can send the contract from the system to the supplier, but the supplier must reply by email, and then the user has to upload the latest version. That kind of process could be improved so you don't need contract authoring to do the redlining.

On the whole, it does what it's meant to do.

I've been using SAP Ariba Procurement for probably about 14 years.

The stability of SAP Ariba Procurement is not bad. It doesn't often fail, and it's quite reliable. It's very rare to have days where you can't do anything in it because it's not working; I couldn't tell you the last time that happened. It is pretty robust and reliable.

In terms of scalability, SAP Ariba Procurement has been used globally in my last company, managing about 300,000 contracts through it. The quantity of events or contracts you can put through it is limitless. Once you've built the process to handle it, you can use it for however many events and contracts that you want. Currently, NSG, where I am at the minute, has done 30,000 contracts in 12 years, while BMS managed 300,000 in five years, so it can handle both effectively.

The customer support team is generally good most of the time. Most of the time, the support is pretty good; however, you do occasionally have a ticket where someone picks it up and they really don't know what they're doing, which can be frustrating, but I'd say that's more uncommon. Typically, when you raise a ticket, the support you get is pretty good.

I'd probably rate their support a seven.

Positive

In my last company, we used Icertis, and if you wanted any configuration done in it, you had to get Icertis themselves to do it, losing control over how you designed and implemented changes into the process and system.

Regarding pricing, from what Absolut told me, it is priced according to the fact that it's not the most technologically advanced tool. For NSG, for sourcing and contracts, I think they pay in the hundreds of thousands a year, maybe two or three hundred thousand pounds, but I'm not certain on that.

The contracts in SAP Ariba Procurement are fairly easy to use, while the sourcing takes a bit of getting used to. We just rolled it out, and I do have to sit with many of the end users who start using it because they just can't figure it out. The sourcing does take a bit of getting used to, but the contracts are fairly straightforward. There's not much you can really do wrong in the contract process, although people do get it wrong. Once you've done it a few times, people pick it up; we have a couple of people in the office who have used it extensively and they know what they're doing.

The benefits of using SAP Ariba Procurement are that it leaves an audit trail. If anyone wants to look at how a sourcing event went, who bid on it, and what the bids were, you can see it. For contracts, you can see who approved, reviewed, and signed it, giving a history of who did what. If someone fiddles something they shouldn't, you can generally find out how they did it, so the audit trail is great. The reporting is quite good; if you want a full list of all your contracts, it's easy to generate that report. The search function on contracts is pretty good, but not quite as good on sourcing. If you want to find a contract, there are various criteria you can search on.

I set a template up for sourcing for someone in India who was previously doing all his sourcing events by email and struggling to track everything, and now he manages everything in a full project within SAP Ariba Procurement, where all relevant information is easily stored and accessible.

I would recommend it to other people. If a company is going to use SAP Ariba Procurement, I would advise them to ensure they have either a consultant or a member of staff who's worked with it before and knows how to configure it, as you can save a lot of money by configuring the processes yourself rather than paying SAP to do it.

I rate SAP Ariba Procurement six out of ten.

The primary use case of Salesforce is in the B2B space. I use it to capture, analyze, summarize, and record customer database and information. It is the de facto standard in the industry for such purposes.

Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters. Its dashboard feature allows me to have a bird's eye view of my organization's performance, meticulously displaying region-wise, department-wise, and country-wise data. 

Additionally, Salesforce's integration with other software solutions enhances my productivity, making it a comprehensive ERP solution. It offers a highly intuitive interface that allows me to generate reports without technical competency and integrates well with other solutions, enhancing productivity.

Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model. This poses challenges for small and medium enterprises due to the high costs of the cloud offering. 

There is a need for varying pricing based on specific features suited for smaller enterprises, as their requirements differ from larger enterprise customers. Additionally, pricing remains uniform globally, which may not suit developing nations.

I have used Salesforce for about seven years.

Salesforce is highly stable. I encountered challenges around three and a half years ago with the transition from Salesforce Classic to Lightning, requiring some unlearning and learning. However, the product has remained stable since then.

Salesforce is highly scalable. My organization's past experience and that of other companies demonstrate its ability to handle small to very large user bases. It manages a large amount of reports and data efficiently, making it a leading solution in terms of scalability.

I have used solutions like PeopleSoft from Oracle, Microsoft CRM, and Siebel, which has been phased out now. Many companies also create homegrown applications. However, Salesforce.com stands out as the leading ERP solution in the industry.

The initial setup is straightforward due to its cloud-based nature. It requires providing user credentials. An administrator assigns different authorization levels to users based on demographics and roles.

Salesforce is priced at a premium, which poses challenges for acquiring it. Small and medium enterprises struggle with the high pricing. I suggest introducing pricing variations based on specific features required by smaller enterprises and adjusting prices to match the economic conditions of different regions.

I have used various CRM solutions such as PeopleSoft from Oracle, Microsoft CRM, Siebel, and company-developed homegrown applications.

Overall, I rate Salesforce ten out of ten, excluding the pricing aspects. Salesforce is an excellent solution, but the cost may be a barrier for smaller enterprises.

We are using this solution in the very basic form. I just use it for the approval process.

We use basic features like getting quotes. 

I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba.

The features I would like to see are, like, we have some of the vendors who are the authorization letters. They agree that the dealership's distributor shipping is valid for a certain period. So it should automatically when their name is clicked, it should show that this dealership is valid for this authorized user for this period of time. So it has to become more informative. It should give reports on the events which have happened in the last six months, the price essentially then between one event to the other. When I am doing the opportunity of procurement, it should come that this event was done in the last thirty days with a different vendor at a different price. Auto-prop should come. I should not have to read it.

I would like to see that the vendors are able to give their documents, the shipment documents, through Ariba. I would like Ariba to give online tracking, so I have a lot of expectations.

I have been using this solution for a year. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.I had to request the code to see a comparison, which is acceptable. Ariba is like a year-old system, and it is used to provide field-grade information. They did improve it; now I receive field-grade data in Ariba. This information allows me to open bids and provides valuable insights into tracking, traceability, audit, etc.

We have our internal IT team. So, I have not got any technical support, I would rate it a zero.

Negative

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a five out of ten. It is neither too easy nor too difficult.  

Ariba has become outdated. I would say that unless you want to get advanced features, they should go for other tools, etcetera, which are more agile.

Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten. 

The product has different modules, like sourcing and contract management. The use case depends on the client's requirements.

Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly. It allows us to manage our relationship with the suppliers, the contracts, and invoices. It makes life easier for our organisation. It is a good application to use.

SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem.

I have been using the solution for one year as a materials management consultant.

Most SAP systems are very stable, especially those hosted on the cloud. The solution is hosted by SAP and controlled by SAP, so it is very stable.

The product is scalable. My client’s company currently has about 7 to 10 people using the solution. These are the internal users. Some external suppliers also use the portal to view contracts and invoices. If there is a need to expand the procurement team, we will increase the usage of the solution. We train the technical team to maintain the solution. We also need to ensure that we have a log where we can check our integrations to ensure there’s no failure.

During implementation, we had some issues with the integration. We contacted SAP, and we were able to resolve them.

The setup is straightforward. SAP provides support to help us with the setup, and they provide a consultant to work with us on the project. It makes the process easier. The solution is cloud-based, hosted by SAP.

SAP has a methodology and approach for implementation. We must ensure that we are prepared for the deployment. Several things need to be in place. We need to pay for our license, SAP provisions, and Ariba for our test environment, where we can configure and test. Once that is done, we sit with the client, take their requirements, and document them. We also need to fill out a workbook, which we will then share with the client to confirm that they agree.

Once the client confirms that everything is correct, we forward it to SAP. SAP will then provision our instance based on the items in the workbook. We also need to discuss integration with the client. Once we are done discussing and obtaining all the necessary documentation, we begin to configure the system. We configure the system and test it. Once we are done setting up the system and testing, we can then deploy it and go live.

The tool improves our efficiency. It also improves our relationship with the supplier and provides real-time analytics. The ROI is very high.

SAP must reduce the pricing for Ariba. The solution is subscription-based. We pay annually for the tool. The license is expensive. It depends on how many users will be working on the platform.

It is one of the best hosting platforms we have around the world right now. I would recommend people to go ahead and use the solution. However, we need to ensure that our in-house team is trained on how to use it. It's not enough to outsource support. We need to ensure that we have the required knowledge to transfer from the implementation partner to our organization.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to procure and collect clients' information in our data warehouse.

The solution's most useful feature is the procurement tool. It collects all the data in one place.

They should make the solution more user-friendly. The users have to download the files whenever they want to view the data for analysis.

We have been using the solution for the last six months.

It is a stable solution.

We have around 50,000 users of the solution in our company.

The initial setup process works fine.

It is an expensive solution.

It is one of the best tools in the market. I recommend it and rate it as a nine.

I work in the digital strategy field for a financial services client. I mainly use Ariba to collect information and manage bills and other contractual information about vendors and contractors who work with me.

The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval.

Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture. In the next release, SAP should add links to artificial intelligence or some other technology that makes it easy to calculate third-party and vendor risk. For example, it could be interesting to include a feature that allows monitoring of clients' processes to evaluate the risk of lock-in and other internal process risks.

I've been using Ariba Procurement for about a year.

Ariba Procurement is very stable.

This is an SAP product, which means it's a blocked solution that relies on security. That means it's easier to scale if you have other SAP products in your architecture.

I would give Ariba Procurement a rating of eight out of ten.

My clients use the solution for indirect procurement. The solution is deployed in the SAP cloud environment.

I like the guided buying features.

The creation tool is for HANA, and I would like the solution to be more automatic.

I've worked with SAP Ariba Procurement for the past ten years. We work with all the solution's versions.

I rate SAP Ariba Procurement's stability a four out of ten. SAP should improve its migration to other systems.

I rate SAP Ariba Procurement's scalability a four out of ten. The solution's customization needs to improve. We have deployed the solution for an enterprise-sized customer.

I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. The solution was not too complicated to set up. The solution takes up to 12 months to deploy.

There are cheaper options available. The licensing cost depends on the customer.

I would not recommend SAP Ariba Procurement, and I rate it a six out of ten.

The Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

We made custom enhancements to suite our business process.

Integration: SAP Ariba's integration has not matured yet, there is lot of scope for improvement in terms scenarios, error handling, data update intervals, etc.

Five years.

No.

No.

No.

A seven out of 10.

An eight out of 10.

Straightforward.

Vendor team: A six out of 10.