Where Guided Sourcing meets SLP
If you spend any time in the SAP blogosphere, you've probably seen the quarterly blog by our own Matt Montgomery titled "Things I Think are Cool" in the latest SAP Ariba release (link to the latest for 2402!). As a long-time fan of these. I’d like to take a page from Matt's book to call out some new functionality that I think is "cool" because it does one of my favorite things: it connects one SAP Ariba solution to another in a meaningful way.
I'm referring to a combination of features from the 2311 release (Enhancements to Supplier Search in Guided Sourcing) and the 2402 release (Support for Custom Filters from SLP in Guided Sourcing). Between these two, finding relevant suppliers for your sourcing events is easier than ever.
Over time, we've seen various elements of SLP appearing in Guided Sourcing. Early on, we were given the ability to automatically add qualified and/or preferred suppliers associated to a common category to a Sourcing event, and to restrict the minimum status for vendors invited to sourcing events (e.g. a supplier must have a status of Registered to participate in an RFP).
We've added to those capabilities by showing a condensed Supplier 360 for each supplier, allowing you to quickly view and filter by status, risk score, and other pertinent information. Now with these latest features, you're able to filter suppliers by Process Status (which are custom to your own organization), and by custom filters, otherwise known as Search Terms.
Search terms can be applied to questions in your various onboarding questionnaires - Supplier Request, Registration, Qualifications, Preferred Supplier management projects, and Modular Questionnaires. If you know you might want to be able to search suppliers for sourcing events based on the answer to a question somewhere in your onboarding process, simply add a search term (no template upgrade required!) to the question, and it becomes a filter for Guided Sourcing, as well as within your Supplier Search screen.
Wondering where you might be able to put this into practice? Many companies are making efforts to do more business with suppliers with ESG initiatives and with diverse vendors. As an example, if you have a question within your onboarding process about whether a supplier is diverse, you can add a search term to the question and specifically search for diverse vendors directly from your Sourcing event.
Alternatively, let's say you use Process Framework and put new vendors through an initial Pre-Registration (miscellaneous) process, and you wish to only invite vendors who have passed that initial screening. You can now quickly find all of those with a custom status of “Pre-Registered”.
Ultimately, these custom statuses and search filters give you more visibility into the supplier database at your fingertips, and greater agility within your Sourcing events. If you are struggling to adopt any of these features, let your CSP know so they can get you the right resources to help you streamline your process!
