Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN)

Guided buying in SAP Ariba Buying creates a simple, smart, and elegant purchasing experience that increases user engagement across all spend areas. It serves as a central place where all buyers can shop across all goods and services. It enables procurement and individual line-of-business (LoB) owners to specify procurement policies and inform and guide users whenever there appear to be policy conflicts. Central Procurement offers a centralized requisitioning process across industries with a deep integration into the customer's landscape. It connects guided buying in SAP Ariba Buying capability to the customer’s ERP or SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems, and exchanges business documents to ensure end-to-end business processes into finance and logistics that run in the connected systems. The integration allows the transfer and updates of the requisition between the two as well as necessary master data.

Key Process Steps Covered

• Access customized guided buying app and search for items across catalogs, including partial items, forms, and suppliers in a single search box
• Get policy guidance as items are added to the requisition
• Enable tactical sourcing by the employee easily
• Validate and submit requisition for simulation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• Simulate requisition creation in the connected satellite back end
• Create purchase requisition and send a request for a guided buying requisition
• Perform budget checks and other validations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud before submitting the requisition
• Approve decisions as per the configured workflow
• Replicate approved requisition into SAP S/4HANA Cloud as purchase requisitions
• Replicate the purchase requisition in the connected satellite system and receive confirmation that the replication was successful
• Create purchase orders, goods receipts, and supplier invoices in a connected satellite system with updates of the references in the guided buying requisition history

Benefits

• Run guided buying for the whole organization using SAP Ariba to leverage the central requisitioning processes
• Increase employee performance with simple guided user experience
• Apply procurement policies automatically through the guided process
• Reduce TCO significantly for procurement departments through centralized process
• Use flexible configuration to allow LoB-specific definition of forms, permissions, and system behavior at field level and for workflows, so each persona in the process only enters their respective data, avoiding clerical errors and streamlining purchasing

Software Products

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• SAP Ariba Buying
• SAP S/4HANA for central procurement

Where is Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying(3EN) being used?

This Scope item is used in the following way:

• As a core function of Operational Procurement within Sourcing and Procurement Scope Item Group

Process flow of Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (3EN)

• Best Practices of SAP S/4HANA On Premise *1
• Best Practices of SAP S/4HANA Cloud *2
• Best Practices of SAP Analytics Cloud *2
• Best Practices of Robotics Process Automation(RPA) with SAP Leonardo *2

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• SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• SAP on Azure
• Business Process Management