You can usually rely on your procurement applications to help your company buy sourced items. But what happens when your employees need those one-off or emergency purchases that do not make sense for Procurement to source? Finding and buying these spot buy items from a large number of suppliers can be costly and time consuming – for both requisitioners and the Procurement department. What is more, these non-sourced goods can account for as much as 15 percent of your company’s indirect spend. Spot Buy is the solution for this problem.
With Spot Buy you will extend your existing catalogues with additional vendors. SAP Ariba offers catalog content from several major regional suppliers. Upon activation of spot buy the content of those suppliers is immediately available. And does your company do not first connect separately. The suppliers ensure that the offered range is up to date. This allows non catalog items ordered as catalog items.
Now spot buy is even better with the new Q1 2017 release. New features are: Spot Buy Promotional Display Lane, Spot Buy Compare, Spot Buy Preferred Items, and Spot Buy Supplier Filter. I will go in some more detail of the functions Spot Buy Promotional Display Lane and Spot Buy Preferred Items.
Spot Buy Promotional Lane
Organizations that use the spot buy can promote items from spot buy suppliers by featuring them in a display lane on the Catalog home page. For example, say your organization would like to encourage employees in a particular location to purchase a specific phone headset from a specific manufacturer. You can then add this headset to the spot buy items display lane and users can then view and order it from there, without having to search for it.
Spot Buy Preferred Items.
To guide your end users to the company’s preferred items, this feature allows organizations to mark spot buy items as preferred items. Preferred items are highlighted at the top of the spot buy search results page and users can add preferred items to their carts immediately. Preferred items will bypass any approvals that might otherwise apply to items in that category.
Difference preferred items and display lane.
Items in the promotional display lane will be advertised in the catalog home page. While preferred items will be highlighted at the top of the search results and no approval from the purchasing department is required. Promotional lane is more appropriate to promote a small group of articles and preferred items show the preferred article within the search results.
So Spot Buy offers several options for administrating and guiding purchases outside contracts. If you would like to know more, please do contact us.[:]