Last week I attended Ariba’s annual event along with Andrew Bartolini and Chris Dwyer. As mentioned in an earlier article one of the main announcements was that Ariba together with Discover is entering the B2B payments market with the introduction of AribaPay (read more about it here). In addition to this there was a lot of information that was shared at this industry leading event, some of which is covered below.
The Ariba Network
According to Ariba’s Chief Product Officer, Sanish Mondkar, there are three main priorities for the Ariba Network going forward (some Ariba Network stats can be found here).
- Open – A network that is open and can connect to any back-end system, any vendor and any protocol.
- Comprehensive – A network that covers all suppliers and multiple business processes. Currently the network supports 10 collaborations between buyers and seller including sourcing, purchase orders, invoice management, etc. Throughout this year and next Ariba will be adding 14 more collaborations related to processes on the supplier side as well as around supply chain, logistics and inventory management.
- Intelligence – One of Ariba’s top priorities is to provide trading partners with a level of intelligence that can only be made available by accessing a large enough “commerce graph” (the Ariba Network, according to Sanish is the world largest commerce graph). The term is derived from the term “social graph”, which is a graph used to depict personal relations of internet users. For example, facebook is the largest social graph and linkedin the largest professional graph. Ariba’s large commerce graph contains a tremendous amount of trading partner data, interactions and communications and the goal is to aggregate all that information and deliver intelligence at the right place at the right time.
One of the new capabilities that delivers such intelligence is “Ariba Recommendations”. This is a new service that pushes network-derived intelligence and community-generated content directly into the context of specific business processes. One example of this is “Suppliers You May Like,” for instance, helps guide buyers to qualified suppliers based on a host of inputs, including buyer requirements, supplier capabilities and performance ratings, and how often other buyers on the network have awarded business to them. Another example of this specifically for sellers is “Profile Pitch”, which allows sellers to create targeted profiles and messaging based on industry, commodity, territory and other factors to promote themselves to buyers.
On the Accounts Payable Front
As many of our readers will already know, Ariba provides solutions around eInvoicing, imaging and data capture services, approval workflow and more capabilities that help to automate the AP process.
Seller Integration to the Ariba Network – A major challenge for large corporations that are pursuing an eInvoicing initiative is getting suppliers onboarded. This is particularly a challenge with the small to mid-sized companies or the “long-tail”. In an effort to address this very issue Ariba and Dell Boomi (a cloud-based integration solution) announced that they will deliver integration packs as a service to help sellers integrate to the Ariba Network in a quick and easy way. These integration packs will be developed by Dell Boomi and made available through the Ariba Integration Connector. Currently, the QuickBooks integration pack is available and additional integration packs for Netsuite, Peachtree and Microsoft Dynamics will be released later in the year. Hopefully, these integration packs are quick and cost effective to deploy and if so, many small to mid-sized companies may find it cost effective and more efficient to integrate order and receivables management with POs and invoices. Moreover, this level of integration really enhances buyer and supplier collaboration and connectivity.
Contract Invoicing – While this may not be a new feature, I think it is worth mentioning as it addresses the issue of savings leakage (especially with non PO invoices), where negotiated savings are not captured due to the lack of compliance to contracts. Contract Invoicing is a feature within the Ariba Network that enables suppliers to create invoices based directly from customer contracts. The buyer can also put in place business rules that the supplier must conform to while creating the invoice in this manner. For example, pricing information and payment terms can be auto-filled, pre-negotiated discounts can be applied automatically from the contract to the invoice line item. Two Ariba customers that shared their stories and utilize this capability extensively are UPS and SunTrust.
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