Check out community member blog posts about spend management and SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur solutions. Post or comment about your experiences.
The SAP Sourcing Optimizer is something that often comes up when architecting on premise deployment scenarios. The Optimizer is an optional tool that comes into use when the Sourcing and auction usage types of the tool are in play. It is not used if the application is purely being used for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). It doesn’t increase the maximum concurrent user count and doesn’t require a similar level of resources as an active sourcing instance might. High availability may also not be necessary for the optimizer should it be placed on its own separate hardware as suggested as failure of the Optimizer will not result in any interruption of the SAP Sourcing application beyond the lack of optimization in certain scenarios. Often we’re contacted by customers who can see an error in their logs complaining about a missing optimizer. This is as a result of the license that has been installed is configured to expect an optimizer configured in the system properties and has been unable to find one. The solution for this is to either install the optimizer and link to it or get a license with the correct modules and remove the old one. For this issue note 1284139 was been created. Another common misunderstanding is that the Optimizer has to be deployed on the same instance as Sourcing. I think the issue commonly arises from both .SCA files being placed in the /usr/sap/trans/EPS/in folder at the same time when JSPM is used to deploy the E-Sourcing application to the Java stack. SAP Sourcing is deployed on NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.11. The Start & Stop: Java EE Applications area of the application shown below can be reached by launching the NWA and on the Operation Management tab choose Systems --> Start & Stop --> Java EE Applications. In Figure 1 we can see where the optimizer has been deployed across 4 instances though it will only be used by one and can only be specified within the application to be accessed on one instance. Figure 1: