What it takes to turn maverick buyers into procurers overnight

Tail-end spend management, indirect requirements, ad hoc orders, free-text orders, maverick buying - let's face it: these are not exactly the favorite topics of a purchasing department.

Usually non-transparent, difficult to manage, unwieldy for the purchaser and far too expensive in the process, marginal requirements procurement often has a grubby image attached to it.

People avoid dealing with the issue because it is complex and usually involves a lot of effort with little "glory" at the same time. If a company has then accepted the challenge and put the optimization of indirect procurement on its agenda, potentials are far from being exhausted.

Supplier selection from the existing portfolio and catalog management often pose challenges. Catalogs are still not available in electronic form as a matter of course, and master data is laboriously maintained manually.

And things don't look much better after the order has been placed: A lot of manual work is involved in accounts payable management and in monitoring the numerous suppliers, and this in a segment where the process costs often exceed the order value.

Customers demand total package

Ariba recognized a long time ago that it had to offer users a complete package in its procurement solutions - in addition to strategic requirements, customers also demand solutions for "the rest".

The Ariba Spot Buy feature simplifies "search and purchase of spontaneously required items". In North and Latin America and Australia, Spot Buy has already been successfully launched with partners ebay and Mercado Libre.

However, the European market requires a special partner. European diversity, so appealing in other areas, quickly becomes a challenge in procurement: infrequent use of purchasing cards, special requirements for invoice documents, different legal requirements, hurdles and high shipping costs for cross-border goods traffic, and even cultural peculiarities make a "one fits all" solution seem unattainable.

With the decision to use Mercateo Unite as the preferred infrastructure for Spot Buy in Europe, such a solution has now become a reality.
The right timing

Even between business partners, there is such a thing as the right timing in such moments. Mercateo had just launched its new B2B networking platform in March 2017, when Ariba had already identified the opportunities for its spot-buy solution with Unite: This means easy onboarding of new suppliers, as well as access to a huge variety of offers on the multi-supplier platform - all in one interface for the user.

No punch-out, no logging into other systems is necessary anymore, the nerves of the requesters are spared. Due to the interface capability (REST API) of Unite, the user remains in his known familiar e-procurement or ERP system.

Integration efforts for new suppliers no longer exist. Necessary settings for compliance with procurement guidelines can be made as usual in the SAP Ariba system.

But that's not all, you guessed it. Unite not only cleans up the system landscape, but also accounts payable management. All suppliers connected via Mercateo Unite are settled via a single vendor. And here, at the latest, indirect purchasing becomes acceptable.