SAP Ariba has made a number of improvements regarding the changes and cancellations of orders by suppliers. In this blog I would like to take you along with two of these improvements.

  • Preventing rejection or cancellation of orders by the supplier.
  • Preventing rejection of already invoiced orders.

Prevent unexpected rejection of orders by the supplier.

In some industries it is important to deliver orders to the right place at the right time, for example, products of the food industry. A delay in delivery, by changing or cancelling an order by the supplier must always be avoided. For this reason, a purchaser benefits from direct contact with the supplier when an order is changed or cancelled. Since Q1 2017, it is possible in SAP Ariba to enforce, as a purchaser, that a supplier can no longer change or cancel an order without direct contact. This prevents a purchaser from being not aware of any change or cancellation from the supplier’s side. Through this form of direct communication, you are able to take timely action when the order cannot be (fully) delivered by this particular supplier.

In the image above, you can see when a supplier rejects the order, a warning is displayed that the buyer has enforced that an order cannot be rejected.

Prevent rejection of already invoiced orders.

Currently, in SAP Ariba it is possible for suppliers to reject already invoiced line items. This can happen, for example, when the invoice has already been sent but nothing has been delivered yet by the supplier. Since Q1 2017, the purchaser can enforce that orders which has already been invoiced can no longer be rejected.

The purchaser has two possibilities.

  • Partially reject line items: in this case, it is only possible for the supplier to reject on item-level a number that is less than or equal to the difference between the quantity ordered and the quantity which is already invoiced.
  • Completely reject line items: in this case, a supplier can no longer reject a line item after it has been invoiced at least one time.

Example 1:

Here, the supplier tries to reject 40 items while there are already 50 articles invoiced. An error will be displayed that it is not possible to reject this number of articles.

Example 2:

The supplier tries to reject the complete line while there are already 50 articles invoiced. An error will be displayed that it is not possible to reject a partially or fully invoiced line item.

For service orders, there is a similar option available. As soon as an invoice has been placed on a service order for one or more items, it is no longer possible to reject the order at header level. In addition, at item level it is not possible to reject a larger amount than has already been invoiced.

You can see that these two improvements from SAP Ariba provide you more and more control over the entire P2P process of your articles and services.

If you would like to know more about the implementation of these new improvements within SAP Ariba, please contact Compera.[:]