Until now, you could not integrate your Material Master Data into Ariba, which hindered Strategic Sourcing and Contracting activities. Without Material Master Data in Sourcing events or Contracts, achieving operational compliance in Downstream systems (e.g. Ariba P2P or Ariba P2O) and ERPs became a challenge.
Luckily, Ariba introduces the Item Material Master Data Integration feature, giving you access to the SAP ERP material master in Ariba Sourcing and Ariba Contracts. This data can now be used to create integrated sourcing events with replicated master data from SAP ERP and SAP ERP validation. Also, contract line items can be created with this replicated master data.
Key benefits are:
- The built in operational compliance to ensure the results of a strategic sourcing event is available for the operational procurement process in SAP ERP
- Enhanced support for Direct material Sourcing events
This new feature is available to all Ariba Contract Management and Ariba Sourcing customers. System and software pre-requisites are:
- Upgrade PI Adapter to CI7
- Install CI7 Release SAP Transport of Ariba Procurement Adapter for SAP
- SAP ERP 6.0 EhP4 or Higher
Integration overview
Master Data Manager
Now, how does it actually work? First, the new Master Data Manager helps you to:
- Configure your external systems
- Manage the Data Load Requests
- Data Search
- Master Data Validation Configuraton(*)
Functional Overview
After you configured the systems, they are available in your Sourcing events.
Once the Master data is loaded, this is available as a source of Sourcing Lines and as a source for Contract lines.
Changes and Limitations
From now on, SAP ERP Master Data will act as an additional data source for Sourcing Events and Contract Line Items (*). A new line item template will be created per new ERP system, which can be edited as well.
There are still some limitations. Material Master long texts and Service Master Integration are not yet supported. However, these are on the Ariba Roadmap, so you can expect these features to be available future releases.
For more information on this new functionality and other exciting new features in Ariba solutions, please feel free to contact us or read some of our other blogs. For example, my colleague Joost Minten has written a blog about the new Ariba Contract Integration with SAP ECC feature.
(*)Using the Contract Line Items Document functionality (CLID). I explain this new feature in another blog, but it is the introduction of a Meta line item structure for Ariba Contract Management similar to Ariba Sourcing line items.