Part 2 - Gotya's to look out on the SAP Ariba Adapter

[vijay_vital]

Hello All,

I would like to share my experience on the features of SAP Ariba Adapter that are available, planned for future or were missing during my implementation. My experience is limited to purchase order outbound, inbound purchase order acknowledgement , inbound shipping notice, supplier invoices and invoice status.

Purchase order

• Standard purchase order, subcontracting, consignment, service orders are supported
• Returns purchase orders are not supported via Ariba (Scoped for future)
• Purchasing group details are not mapped and can be mapped to contact details on the xml via enhancement. Please check my other blog which details enhancements/exists.
• The phone and fax number format (Area code, city code) are different in Ariba than SAP and add a extra brackets and we had to enhance.
• Price tolerance on the purchase order are sent to Ariba and has influence on inbound purchase order acknowledgement (POA). They could stop purchase order acknowledgement/confirmations in Ariba based on tolerance sent from SAP.
• Freight condition are not mapped  by default however there is an estimated Freight cost that can be sent to Ariba via XML. We added the sum of all planned freight cost and passed onto a single field on the xml.
• Some of our suppliers hardcoded the plant number ( buyerLocationID) to addresses rather than reading  address details from XML. This impacted third party orders sent to suppliers. Hence for all third party orders we change location tag to  'OneTime'. We also updated the mapping information guide document for vendor to map address when they see a 'OneTime' address.

Shipment Notification (ASN)

• Shipment notification create inbound delivery only. For third party orders we needed to post goods receipt. This had to be enhanced.
• Serial number in SAP are only 18 Characters. If the serial over 18 character the will be truncated. We enhance to read from right to left.
• If we didn't flag batch material where as supplier sent batch it will populate the data.
• Batch number is SAP has only 10 character and had to be validated.

Supplier Invoice

• Ariba add-on supports invoice and credit memo. However doesn't support subsequent credit. We enhanced the logic.
• All fright are posted as unplanned Freight. We added custom logic to handle this.
• Freight on header of invoice are not supported by add-on adapter. We added custom logic to handle this.
• Invoice reference number in SAP are always shown as capitals. Ariba support both capital and small letters. This makes it pass the duplicate check in SAP. We enhanced it to change to capital letter.
• Payment terms from the supplier overrides the defaults if they are populated. This means supplier can override your payment terms.
• Baseline date calculation had issue for end of month date calculation
• Freight on credit memo was enhanced as well.

Invoice status

• Some invoice status error details are not self explanatory for some errors. This may need enhancement.

Hope you find this document useful.