An expanded program team deployed SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, devoting six months on the initial go-live followed by a 12-month global deployment to more than 60 countries. They used the Accenture SAP Cloud Platform Center of Excellence assets, agile methodology, and cloud experience. They also made high reuse of SAP Ariba-specific process documents, requirement templates, and configurations, enabling them to stand up solutions quickly. A global design allowed the team to develop and deploy 80 percent of the solution in the first deployment and greatly accelerated subsequent deployments.
The deployment was one of the first and largest SAP Ariba Guided Buying instances globally. The enhanced capabilities of the cloud-based SAP Ariba vastly improved the buying experience, especially for infrequent users, and has been key to shaping the buying behaviors for Accenture people. SAP Ariba allows Accenture users to be faster, more compliant, and more cost-effective in their purchasing. The solution improved the buying experience and increased procurement savings by intuitively directing Accenture buyers to goods and services with contracted pricing.
With the foundation of SAP Ariba On Demand in place, Accenture continues to refine and enable content and look for opportunities to leverage new functionality, such as the Procurement Operations Desk. At the same time, Accenture shifted its strategic focus from managing controls and compliance to improving the user experience through standardization, simplification, and automation to reduce friction in a compliant manner.
This shift allows more procurement professionals to engage in activities that drive additional business value, from managing the supplier and contract life cycle, to innovating with ecosystem partners, to promoting greater sustainability. With this shift in focus, the organization rebranded itself to Procurement Plus to reflect the fact that it is no longer simply a back-office, spend management function.
Key areas of focus of Accenture’s Procurement Plus journey include:
Focus on content enablement
Accenture grows its product and service catalog and contract content by continuously increasing and enhancing content. One aspect is enabling the capability to buy commoditized items directly from such marketplaces as Amazon Business, allowing Accenture to offer a wider array of products and reduce catalog setup and maintenance effort in these categories.
Enhancement of guided buying, digital buying and UX
Accenture continues to enhance the Guided Buying capability including a new capability to proactively advise employees on the purchase options of IT accessories when they exchange laptops.