Ariba Guided Buying – What is it and how businesses can use it for their benefit?

Organizations trust SAP Ariba to make their procurement, financial supply chain management, and fulfillment processes well-streamlined. From enterprises to mid-sized businesses and expanding ventures – all kinds of companies use it, and rightly so. This system is optimal for all types of products and services. Be it spending (buying), sourcing, payment, or contracts, SAP Ariba is a productivity-booster for all your business operations.

Now that you want to deploy guide buying for your organization, SAP Ariba can make the process simpler and smoother. In this article, we are going to tell you what does Guided Buying mean, how will it be advantageous for your business, and how it works.

What is Guided Buying?

It is a persona-based purchase-related application that requires no or very little involvement of procurement departments in the buying process. Capturing the purchase policies, this process educates and guides your personnel to make purchases that adhere to those policies.

Guided Buying makes your procurement interface more intuitive. It will prevent any kind of wrong decisions, helping you send procurement requests that do not violate the organization’s buying policies. Not just buying, you can also take its help while sending other requests, such as, non-catalog requests, service requests, sourcing requests, contracting, and so on.

Also Read: Ariba Spot Buying

Benefits of Guided Buying

Guided Buying is an in-built capability of SAP Ariba that you can leverage using SAP Ariba buying without spending any extra money. From the amount spend target to types of items, you may enforce policies for everything related to Buying with Guided Buying feature. Benefits of using this capability are:

• Improved Productivity and improve Employee Performance
  Generally, businesses put their most skilled procurement specialists for making the buying decisions. However, this process can be automated and handled much easier when you make a shift to Guided Buying.
  Using simple search fields and landing pages, customized as per specific needs, SAP Ariba Guided Buying can make the whole process hassle-free. It enables a user-friendly interface for procurement of goods and services that is aligned automatically to the company’s buying and spending compliances.
  With SAP Ariba, even the occasional buyers can pull off the buying operation well. Using this reliable tool, you can free up your most useful resources for other essential tasks and improve your productivity.
• Improved Decision-making
  Guided Buying lets each persona (in the process) enter data as authenticated so that clerical errors could be avoided. Businesses can add definitions of forms, details related to the field level system behaviour, persona configurations and user permissions while using SAP Ariba. With this much flexibility, you can streamline the processes better.
  As SAP Ariba Guided Buying lets you apply rules from policies directly for the processes, you won’t be making mistakes while sending procurement requests. It helps you take better decisions and avoid flaws or mistakes that might happen due to human intervention or complicated policies.
• Centralized Process for reduced incurring
  You can centralize all your requisitioning processes through SAP Ariba Guided Buying. This way, the cost of ownership for your ownership could be reduced, and the incurring for the procurement department(s) will become lower too. As everything related to purchases is centralized, the related data and operations will become more manageable for your employees.

Functionality of Guided Buying

Organizations can allow their users to initiate Guided Buying through their company’s intranet e.g. in the employee portal, using SAP Fiori tile, or optionally, by integrating it with SAP S/4 HANA. You can fetch real-time master data through SAP Ariba Guided Buying. It means that details like business units, supplier details, commodity code, shipping address, etc.

The key capabilities of Guided Buying are as enlisted:

• Use the same search box for searching through catalogs, forms, items, services, and partial items.
• Let your employees plan and do sourcing well.
• Guide employees throughout the procurement process through policy rules, errors, and warnings.
• Fetch and submit real-time master data to and from SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• Simulate demand, purchases, and requests
• Create purchase orders, receipts, and invoices in a connected satellite system
• Check budget and other major details without needing to read bulky policy manual.
• Replicate approved demands and add them to SAP S/4 HANA as purchase demands to save time.
• Replicate the confirmed purchase demands in the connected satellite system

Thinking how to do it?

Here is how to enable your organization for Guided Buying through SAP Ariba:

1. First of all, make a list of people in the organization that make purchases. Allot them user personas.
2. Make a list of all kinds of spends that may happen i.e. categorize your purchases as per item names and service names. Each purchasing unit has its landing page and can be accessed by authorized users once they log in. You may create landing pages for efficient searching through user interface itself, using JSON or through excel sheets.
3. For each type of spend, identify which supplier(s) will be suitable.
4. Define your policies to complete the process. You may create data validation policies, supplier selecting policies, checkout selection generation policies and supplier & touch policies. The policies data can also be imported to SAP Ariba Guided Buying through excel sheet(s).

Once configured, your internal procedures will be governed using these policies. Enterprises can add errors and warnings for violation of any policy so that high-value and high-quality procurement could be carried out.

The Final Word

Guided Buying in SAP Ariba helps ventures by streamlining the procurement process, making it automated and error-free. It is a smarter solution that can provide your employees with a single gateway for the completion of all types of procurement requests.

Through SAP Ariba Guided Buying, you can fully-automate low-value requests in bulk, while increasing your chances when it comes to high-value requests. So, if you want to tactically spend but reduce the manual efforts in the process, consider Ariba Guided Buying. Take help of Stridely Solutions for its successful deployment and improve your team’s productivity.