SAP is currently recommending its clients who are currently on Ariba on-premise for indirect procurement to move to SAP Ariba Solutions for strategic sourcing and supplier management. The move to SAP Ariba Solutions on-cloud is a re-implementation of all SAP Ariba components and involves migration of all contracts – both meta-data and actual contracts – which may exist in many forms (pdf, scanned images etc). This frees the clients from needing any SAP S4/HANA components.
While some clients are choosing to move from Ariba on-premise to SAP Ariba Solutions on cloud, there are others who are hesitant. Here are a few reasons why some clients choose not to move to an on-cloud solution:
- Heavy customization or integrations:
Customers who have undertaken various product customizations or integrations are resisting the change. For instance, many customers use OpenText for invoicing and an Excel plug-in such as Z Options along with Ariba. The question then arises- who will redo these integrations?
- Technology adoption challenges:
The communication setup between on-premise ERP and cloud-based Ariba suite is not stable yet- a variety of failures and issues are still being faced, making the transition a bit rough and slow for some customers. Competitors are taking advantage of this situation and poaching SAP Ariba clients.
- Adoption challenges in learning a new platform:
New interfaces and hybrid solutions make it challenging for clients to handle on-premise local master data and ERP with public cloud shared services. While this may settle over time, the customers just prefer to stick to their legacy setup for now.
- Migrations at a different pace:
Ariba network is one of the world’s largest B2B networks but not everyone on the network is making the migration to the new hybrid model at the same pace. Ariba also knows that customers who haven’t followed them to the cloud, stand the risk of going with a competitor when they do make the move.
On the other hand, the biggest advantage of using hybrid cloud encourages customers to move away from highly customized business processes to business standard quality processes, following the industry’s standard best practices.
Whether clients choose to migrate to SAP Ariba on-cloud or any other solution, most of them ask the same questions:
- What’s in my existing contracts?
- What’s my risk exposure?
- Since these contracts were signed in the past, are there any compliance issues, and have laws changed since?
- Which contracts do I migrate?
- When do these come up for renewal?
- What clauses/terms should I be wary of when I renew?
- What’s the fastest way to migrate?
- How do I build a master clause repository from the legacy contracts?
Given the current situation, it is inevitable that many customers will require contracts to be migrated. This is the right time for XtractEdge Contract Analysis to help clients migrate their contracts from Ariba to SAP Ariba solutions or other platforms.
XtractEdge Contract Analysis does not get in the way of the operational processes. It in fact accelerates the adoption in the following ways:
- It helps understand what clauses and terms exist in legacy contracts
- It selects which contracts to move
- It understands the risks and compliance issues in contracts thoroughly
- It helps build a master clause repository with fallback clauses
- It helps validate contracts once the migration is completed
- It can tag contracts with a variance in clauses as compared to the master clause
- It analyzes new contracts for risk and compliance
XtractEdge Contract Analysis utilizes advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques to automate contracts digitization and extraction, enables operational risk analysis, checks compliance and helps in revenues generation. It acts as a single source of truth to answer any kind of contracts related information by using the following:
- Open architecture to extend ML algorithms
- Out-of-box contract ML models and flexibility for creating context-specific models
- Multiple Neural Pathways with high accuracy
Let’s discuss more on this if you have any questions. Get in touch with us here.
Rajeshwari Ganesan & Badri Devalla
More blogs from Rajeshwari Ganesan >