In today's complex business environment, managing supplier risk is essential for a resilient and compliant supply chain. Ariba Supplier Risk is a comprehensive platform designed to empower procurement teams to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate supplier risks.
As part of the Product Management team of SAP Ariba Supplier Risk, we receive many questions related to the features, roadmap and future direction of SAP Ariba Supplier Risk.
In this blog, I would like to highlight some features that we have been working on, as well as some that are ready to be released in 2024.
I would like to assure you that we do take your feedback seriously and keep track of all the ideas and suggestions that are logged into the Influence tool. Please do log your ideas there and vote the ones that are critical for you, as this helps us prioritize features in the roadmap.
While we are on a journey towards Risk Aware Procurement and integrated procurement solutions, I would like to specifically mention here three features related to SAP Ariba Supplier Risk that are most queried or talked about.
1. Licensing third party data providers
A common user query: “Can I connect data-provider xyz to Ariba Supplier Risk? “
Considering that Ariba Supplier Risk is the preferred product for our customers to report regarding compliance related to various regulations, it becomes important to allow our customers to bring in relevant data from third-party data providers of their choice.
This would help in increased data accuracy as well as comprehensive risk evaluation of the suppliers.
For this, SAP actively works with multiple partners providing data related to risk categories like financial, environmental, and social, natural disasters, sustainability, etc. and onboard them on the SAP Appstore.
SAP Ariba Supplier Risk also allows customers using Risk Category Information API for Supplier Risk Exposure to have third party data providers as licensed providers, where customers have direct licenses with these data providers. The data is brought in SAP Ariba Supplier Risk for integrated Risk exposure calculation and updated supplier profile information. More details can be found here.
2. Multi-supplier Engagement Requests (ER)
Voice of a customer: “I cannot create individual ERs multiple times to send questionnaires to thousnds of my suppliers in order to gather information relevant for LksG. Can we send one ER to multiple suppliers? “
A common requirement as part of Risk Management is collecting information from multiple suppliers for regulations like LksG (German Supply Chain Law), ERSR -S2 (Workers in the value chain), CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting by European Commission), EUDR (European Deforestation Regulation) etc. Questionnaires for assessments need to be sent, depending on the regulation requirements, to the suppliers, asking them for providing relevant information. This can now be achieved by raising one Engagement Request. This can then be sent to a maximum of 5000 suppliers. Individuals ERs are created for all these suppliers automatically and the responses can be received through ER if these suppliers are registered on the network.
With this feature, we can now streamline and make our risk assessment process efficient by sending assessments to up to 5,000 suppliers at once, saving valuable time and resources.
More information can be found here.
3. User-based permissions.
Feedback of a user: “I need better control and visibility regarding who is sending suppliers for evaluation, or who is requesting for reports related to suppliers within my organization.”
Improve operational efficiency as well as save costs by assigning specific user roles (Sending suppliers for evaluation, Risk Analyst, etc.) to manage tasks and access based on needs.
We now have this feature that establishes four new user groups to perform dedicated administrative actions.
Please check this link for more details.
There are several new features that are being delivered in H2 2024. They are aimed at comprehensive and integrated Risk Management of your suppliers. Some examples are - increasing risk categories from 4 currently available ones to upto 25 custom risk categories, enhanced supplier abstract risk analysis with the aid of country risk scores, enhanced API related to Engagement Requests to aid in better data extraction and some more.
If you would like to provide feedback or suggestions, please log your valuable feedback in the Customer Influence as this directly shapes the future of SAP Ariba Supplier Risk.
References:
LksG - https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Gesetze/Wirtschaft/lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz.html
ESRS -S2 https://www.efrag.org/Assets/Download?assetUrl=%2Fsites%2Fwebpublishing%2FSiteAssets%2FED_ESRS_S2.pd...
CSRD - European Commission (https://finance.ec.europa.eu/capital-markets-union-and-financial-markets/company-reporting-and-audit...)
EUDR - https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/forests/deforestation/regulation-deforestation-free-products...
