Elevating purchasing excellence in the cloud

As part of a major push to simplify and better manage spend, Sun Chemical sought to transition its purchasing functions to the cloud. Making this move would help the company align with industry best practices. It would also help it deploy new functionalities such as guided buying and spot buy. And it would facilitate quarterly updates to its SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing system while avoiding lengthy and costly system implementations.

As a move to the cloud would be a major undertaking, Sun Chemical was confident that Accenture was the right collaborator to help implement a solution, transition its purchasing systems to the cloud and facilitate a seamless transition of the platform back to application support.

Sun Chemical and Accenture implemented the cloud-based SAP Ariba buying and invoicing module over a 10-month period. This solution includes new features. For instance, guided buying routes users to the correct type of purchase and permits rules to stop users from submitting a requisition if they are out of policy. And spot buying gives users a chance to buy from established sellers and marketplaces instead of creating a non-catalog requisition.

Importantly, the implementation brought in the Cloud Integration Gateway (CIG), the newest integration toolkit that facilitates master data and transactional data transfer between ERP systems and Ariba. The implementation of CIG moves all integration components to the cloud, allowing customers to avoid periodically re-implementing a new integration toolkit.

Working within a challenging timeline, Accenture leveraged its high velocity accelerators (notably myConcerto assets such as a prepopulated business requirements workbook and a master data integration guide) to quickly educate Sun Chemical’s employees on functionality available within Ariba.

Assistance was also provided by the onshore team that worked collaboratively with the offshore delivery center in the Philippines, as well as the application outsourcing teams.

The purchasing solution not only allows Sun Chemical’s employees to stay up to date with the latest functionality, but also provides a user-friendly interface that routes purchasing users through recommended buying channels.