Project management is not new to strategic sourcing and its importance is obvious: strategic sourcing itself is a project requiring the disciplining of the pre- sourcing, unstructured processes. Indeed, Ariba should be chided to being late in delivering more effectively on this vision while some competitors have caught up.Īriba's major advance is the Category Management offering that is positioned as the project management or planning component of the strategic sourcing cycle.

And Ariba has not neglected the details, as Analysis now includes 55 templates addressing spend, compliance, and performance analysis issues. In effect, Ariba can now leverage Analysis better to deliver on its vision of enterprise spend management for supplier, commodity, or cost-center optimization and savings that is its hallmark. For example, Analysis can now get data more easily out of legacy systems and share it more effectively with Buyer, Sourcing, Invoice, or Contracts. The new Ariba Spend Management release is important not so much for the enhancements to the feature sets of Ariba Enterprise Sourcing, Buyer, Analysis, Contracts, Invoice, Supplier Network, Workforce, and Travel and Expense, but rather for the delivery of a more seamless integrated platform that overcomes, in many areas, the obstacles created by the evolved nature of the offering and disparate product codes. In addition, Ariba still has the best customer base among the B2B Internet commerce pure-plays, and recent data that indirect materials e-procurement (MRO and office supplies) now accounts for only 10% of Ariba's total sourcing activity indicating strong up-take for direct materials or strategic sourcing. Strategic sourcing competitors will need to adjust their strategies because of Ariba's strengthened technology base and product vision.

We are taking a very positive stance on Ariba's new release of Ariba Spend Management and the introduction of the Category Management offering because the company has made great strides in developing a more seamless integrated enterprise strategic sourcing platform, has provided some important differentiators in project management, and has executed in delivering more effectively on its Enterprise Spend Management strategy.

Ariba office supplies