Streamline and strengthen global compliance with SAP Ariba solutions

Effectively manage contracts, suppliers, and compliance in virtually every country and currency, so you can deliver what the business needs, where it’s needed.

“If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance.” – Former US Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty

When customers and prospects tell us about the challenges they face, several key concerns repeatedly come up: inefficient procurement processes that fail to capture all business spending, poor supplier communication and relationships, and difficulty managing compliance. I’d like to talk about the last item on this list – compliance, especially in international commerce.

As Procurement teams develop their indirect and direct materials strategies, they must balance the risk of sourcing products across oceans and international borders with opportunities to save money. The complexity involved extends beyond the simple question of delivery dates. Unless you properly manage contract fulfilment, currency use, tax collection, and regulatory compliance worldwide, problems arise that can quickly snowball into catastrophe. But if automated compliance capabilities are built into the P2P process, Procurement can spend less time troubleshooting and more time building value for the business. Here are three ways SAP can help:

• With availability in 190+ countries and support in 24 languages, SAP Ariba solutions let you customize interactions based on preferred look/feel, language, and other characteristics. This means local teams can see screens in their native tongue and conduct transactions in their local currencies – a critical advantage for companies with international supply chains that need such flexibility to conduct business. Read more about a customer that saw the benefits this provides in its work with companies across southeast Asia.

• Embedded support to add and validate taxes plus other local charges on requisitions, POs, invoices, and reconciliations offers another layer of compliance strength. Combined with highly automated ways to handle complex procurement tasks, this helps teams ensure that the correct price and VAT are captured across two-, three-, or even four-way matching processes. The result? In a recent SAP proprietary benchmarking study, SAP found that the top 25% of our customers saw more than 90% of their invoices processed without exceptions.

• SAP Ariba solutions also incorporate regulatory requirements to help you comply with legal mandates such as the General Data Protection Regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Tools to eliminate maverick spend offer another crucial resource to optimize regulatory compliance. The same benchmarking study showed that the top 25% of SAP customers have 94% of their spend under management – including 50% higher spend from contracts, catalogs, and business process outsourcing than the average.

By working with a global leader like SAP, your Procurement teams can rest easy knowing that the business is following local regulations while maximizing cost savings. Read more about the remarkable results this can deliver. By leveraging SAP Ariba solutions to automate procurement, they realized significant savings, faster processing times, and increased spend compliance – even with an implementation that occurred during the pandemic.

For more information about how SAP can help you strengthen your global procurement strategy, visit our web page.