SAP Ariba Category Management
Improving business outcomes with intelligent category management
In times of uncertainty, category management is becoming more essential to meeting spend management goals. By automating and streamlining category management processes, you can focus more on strategy and value realization to increase productivity, savings, and profits.
Built on SAP Business Technology Platform, the SAP Ariba Category Management software solution digitalizes and streamlines the development, execution, and monitoring of category strategies for faster, more efficient category management in procurement.
- Higher cost savings through system-based actionable insights
- Reduced time spent on data gathering, analysis, and preparation
- Enriched and categorized spend data
- Increased time for strategizing and initiative execution
Key benefits
Make better decisions and increase cost savings
Gain in-depth access to actionable insights to help form a cohesive category management strategy and increase sourcing savings on direct and indirect spend.
Spend more time on strategy and value creation
Free up resources by replacing manual, offline, and inconsistent processes with automated, streamlined category strategy creation and management.
Create consistent category management frameworks
Use a consolidated category taxonomy for purchasing that provides a uniform, enterprise-wide framework for classifying goods and services.
Key features
Simplified creation of category spend profiles
- Enable users to create comprehensive category 360 profiles
- Create logical and manageable product and service categories using a purchasing category taxonomy for mapping to existing classifications
- Provide instant views into category spend and suppliers based on classified and enriched data
Guided process for strategy and plan development
- Provide industry standards-based guided strategy frameworks and system-recommended opportunities
- Follow a step-by-step strategy development process that uses category segmentation and customizations
- Use tools for creating purchasing strategies based on the Kraljic matrix for segmenting categories
Outcome monitoring and execution
- Cascade opportunities for effective execution while monitoring KPI performance
- Use built-in analysis to identify, create, and monitor opportunities for category-specific goals
- Get system-recommended opportunities based on supplier fragmentation, impact, price variances, tail spend, and supplier diversity
Take category management beyond admin
Avoid mistakes and get the best practices to keep your transformation on track.
A deeper dive into category management transformation
Rethinking and retooling category management
An Economist Impact global survey reveals that a risk-focused category management strategy ranks as a top-five approach for delivering value in procurement.
Avoiding three key mistakes in category management
We gathered key takeaways from a global survey to reveal three common mistakes to avoid while transforming category management into a business value driver.
Technical information
Discover how our cloud solutions fuel your spend strategy with SAP Business Technology Platform and protect your enterprise with built-in security.
Visibility
Unlock spend data with solutions that deliver total spend visibility, aid in planning and forecasting, and connect critical data from SAP and third-party sources.
Extensibility
Customize and extend the value of spend management solutions by eliminating inefficiencies, building new apps, enhancing existing apps, and providing personalized experiences.
Integration
Centralize data, remove silos, and create a connected enterprise with integration solutions from SAP, streaming your source-to-pay process with prebuilt connections.
Data security
Help protect confidentiality and data integrity.
Business process security
Support compliance with regularity requirements.
Risk and threat mitigation
Drive continuous improvement across your operations.
Cloud delivery operations
Enable a smooth transformation while meeting security and compliance requirements.
Revolutionizing category strategy with generative AI
Empower your category managers with contextual insights and recommendations using generative AI and large language model (LLM) integration.
Rich, relevant content prefilled in category tools
- Accelerate strategy and planning processes across multiple categories
- Reduce onboarding time and reliance on more senior category managers
- Gain time per category and adapt to market change with insight and agility
Services and Support
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SAP Services and Support
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SAP for Me portal
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