]Is your company also struggling with their tail spend? Although you cover the majority of your spend through sophisticated purchasing processes with preferred suppliers, your companies tail spend is probably fragmented into many suppliers (Pareto principle: 80% of your suppliers cover 20% of your spend). Now of course you can try to manage your tail spend with new solutions, where you integrate webshops, such as Amazon or Bol.com into your catalog buying process with the SAP SRM User Interface Add On and Catalog Cloud Services from BeNeering, but it still doesn’t cover all the vendors of your tail spend.
Within SAP Ariba every supplier can register at the Ariba Network and can offer their products and services, but registered use of the Ariba Network will result in additional fees. However, the majority of your suppliers in the tail spend category will have limited annual transactions for which the registration is not profitable. 
But on the other hand you also want to optimize the purchasing process with these suppliers. And there the new SAP Ariba functionality of Light Enablement through an Interactive Email – Order comes in. It simplifies how a supplier receives a purchase order from your company, for which they easily can send a purchase order confirmation and an invoice, which requires no upfront supplier enablement or registration to the Ariba Network.
How does it work?
Suppliers will receive an Interactive Email – Order. The e-mail contains the purchase order, as well as two interactive buttons that allows the supplier to create and send an order confirmation, as well as an invoice. 
These buttons will take the supplier to the Ariba Network through their internet browser without any registration! When they create and submit an invoice for example, the same business rules for invoice validation and matching will apply as your company maintained on the Ariba Network. 
After submitting the invoice, the Ariba Network will send the invoice data in a cXML file, which is the standard format of Ariba, and also as a PDF. To send an e-mail with these files and if suppliers want to receive notifications about the invoice they will need to verify their e-mailadress. This process requires only entering a one-time password, which they will receive upon submitting the invoice.
This new feature can be used for all your tail spend suppliers without additional costs and your company will receive more accurate invoices, which will reduce supplier inquiries. Of course they can then decide if they want to use the Light Enablement functionality or take advantage of the Full Ariba Network functionality.
Do you want to know more about Ariba Light Enablement using Interactive e-mail – Order and the thresholds for this free solution? Please contact Compera for more information.[:]