This approach may be more appropriate for your organisation because: I don’t mean assembling a solution from 15 different products, but maybe four or five.įor example, you may want one central solution for S2C, embrace two or three P2P products that different autonomous divisions currently use, with maybe one or two additional specialist products for, say, services procurement, or SRPM. I advise most clients to follow an eclectic, multi-sourcing strategy for their key business applications. Yet our research suggests that very few companies actually implement a whole suite, even if they buy one. Many clients tell us they want a complete suite to support all their digital procurement, including supplier risk and performance management (SRPM), upstream source-to-contract (S2C) and downstream procure-to-pay (P2P). I see a similar bias towards suites driving market consolidation at the moment, such as Determine/ b-pack, Coupa/ Trade Extensions, Tradeshift/ IBX and BravoSolution/ Puridiom. Yes, there are advantages in buying software from a known source, but those won’t outweigh the disadvantages if the product is deficient, or fails to keep pace with the market.Īn existing supplier’s product, such as SAP Ariba, or Oracle Procurement Cloud, may be the best choice for your organisation, but it should be a choice, after you have compared it with leading independent alternatives. That’s a dangerous strategy, often driven by people who are thinking more about their own short-term job security than about their current employer’s long-term success.

For instance, one source told me “we didn’t choose Ariba, we chose SAP, and SAP chose Ariba”.

While doing my research for The Forrester Wave™: eProcurement, Q2 2017, I was surprised and disappointed by how many companies I interviewed had bought an incumbent vendor’s eProcurement product without really looking at alternatives.

Choosing new procurement software should be exactly that, a choice! Duncan Jones on why organisations should follow an eclectic, multi-sourcing strategy for their key business applications.

Ariba s2c