As of March this year, at SAP Ariba LIVE, Alex Atzberger reported that 33,000 suppliers had transacted $18 billion in spend with light enablement, and that 15% of Light Enablement customers had upgraded to paid versions of the network. Light Enablement was a rapid success in terms of adoption. Light enablement would eventually give way to Light Accounts, which added additional features, and Ariba continues to build out capabilities each quarter. Smaller suppliers, including those transacting infrequently but receiving higher dollar value POs and sending large invoices, were the ones that yelled the most (rightly so), especially in cases where they did not want to use the Ariba Network to connect to other buying organizations or as a tool to market themselves.īut SAP Ariba finally listened, introducing what it described as Light Enablement in 2016, a first step down the “free path” for suppliers. Many of the these past screams and criticisms from smaller suppliers (and analysts) were justified. And we’ve covered this topic extensively. Pardon the frankness, but Ariba used to get a lot of, well, stuff that you step on when walking the streets of Paris without looking down for a network-based business that charged suppliers for connectivity (included along with a bunch of other things, mind you).
But for SAP Ariba customers, another one on the same order of magnitude in the past 12 months has been the adoption of suppliers transacting with free accounts. The rapid rise of Amazon Business has been one of these changes, whether that’s perceived as good or bad. And sometimes, it happens with suppliers to procurement organizations, too. For a function that’s fairly conservative - and stands to lose more by making individual mistakes than it stands to gain from individual successes - this is a reasonable approach.
Procurement transformation is usually about incrementalism.
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