SAP Ariba Procurement Reviews

The PunchOut functionality is fantastic as it makes shopping very easy. This has saved us a lot of time in that employees can look directly on a vendor's website, see what's available, and order it.

Rather than having to run orders through the business office and have them placed by someone else, users can do their own shopping and submit their own carts. This has reduced a lot of data entry and improved efficiency, as we do not need to communicate lack of availability or other issues with an initial order request.

The SAP portion of the procurement is not always obvious or user friendly. Things such as cost center can be prepopulated for items selected, but the vendor cannot. For larger shopping carts, this becomes somewhat tedious having to enter the vendor 20+ times.

Over five years.

From the user end, not really. It can be frustrating if you forget to save your shopping cart that you lose all of your work, but we’ve learned not to leave a SC unattended anymore.

This is not applicable to me as the end user. I’m not sure if the university did or did not have any issues with scalability.

Similarly, any requests for technical support are not issued or run through me, so I don’t hear about its effectiveness.

BU did use a previous procurement system and we switched for two reasons. First, we switched because the university was changing its accounting system to SAP, and Ariba integrated with SAP. Beyond that, our old procurement system was simply severely outdated.

I was not present at BU when the initial set up occurred.

Similarly, I was not present during the initial purchase.

I’m sure other options were considered, but I was not involved.

As with many SAP products, I’d encourage users to recognize that it is a powerful but not intuitive product, and that training is vital.