Executing an Effective Automated Sourcing Strategy
With margins under pressure, keeping control of costs is key. By streamlining access to a global network of suppliers and increasing spend visibility, you can speed up your sourcing cycles, adapt to evolving organisational needs, and discover valuable savings opportunities. Executing an effective automated sourcing strategy provides you with the single greatest opportunity to impact the cost, quality, and performance of your supply chain and your business.
Improve spend coverage across all categories
Help sourcing managers create and manage the sourcing pipeline to rationalize the supply base, negotiate lower pricing, and respond to demand.
Execute your desired sourcing outcomes
Catalyze your sourcing strategy using a range of advanced RFP and auction tools, aligned to the requirements of each spend cagtegory.
Realise sustainable savings for the business
Enforce negotiated savings when you integrate sourcing with contracting, supplier management, operational procurement, and analytics processes.
Align your Sourcing Tools to Your Sourcing Strategy
Many organizations have a broad and often complex range of sourcing requirements across both direct and indirect spend channels, however typically sourcing applications tend to focus on addressing the needs of a particular sourcing type. Therefore, to operate effectively, it essential to consider introducing a more integrated best-of-breed approach to leverage the unique benefits of the specialized sourcing tools that are available.
Generic eSourcing Tools
Generic eSourcing tools, such as SAP Ariba Sourcing, provide a fast, simplified, and scalable guided sourcing platform to support the majority of your category spend. Allowing your internal sourcing desk to work with business units to identify opportunities, to rationalize the supply base, negotiate lower pricing, or implement new requirements.
Ideal for:
- Tactical Spend
- Standard award decisions
- Indirect spend categories
Complex Sourcing Tools
Complex sourcing tools, such as Keelvar’s Sourcing Optimizer, allow you to rapidly create and execute even the most advanced sourcing projects regardless of complexity or size. Data collected, business constraints and stakeholder requirements can be modelled into scenarios and optimized on both price and non-price factors to find the best outcome.
Ideal for:
- Strategic spend
- Complex award decisions
- High volume of line items/SKUs
- Logistics, MRO, Packaging, Direct Materials
Autonomous Sourcing Tools
Autonomous sourcing tools, such as Keelvar’s Autonomous Sourcing, empowers all employees to easily run sourcing events themselves without adding workload to the sourcing team. Your sourcing team can easily create category-specific automated workflows where sourcing bots automatically execute the sourcing event.
Ideal for:
- Tactical and tail spend
- Spot buying
- Smaller purchases
- Control across more spend categories
Migrate Your SAP Ariba Classic Sourcing to the New and Enhanced Guided Sourcing Version
With support for the classic UX in SAP Ariba Sourcing no longer available by the end of Q1 2025, there is no better time to start to plan your migration across to the new Guided Sourcing UX.
The new Guided Sourcing capability available with the SAP Ariba Sourcing solution delivers a simplified, intuitive user experience. Ensure realization of business benefits such as savings, transparency and compliance with a user friendly interface, reduced change management and autonomous procurement capabilities.
Extend Sourcing Excellence Beyond Sourcing Events
To source from the appropriate suppliers and enforce the terms of the agreement, you need to adopt a much broader view of the sourcing process, and ensure that the right sourcing solution that is connected to a spend analytics, contracting and supplier management solution.
By extending your sourcing solution to a wider source-to contract process, you will be able to create more process efficiencies across the entire cycle, capture more savings by achieving contract compliance and stopping savings leakages, whilst also minimizing supply risks.