Is your organization, like many others, satisfied with the user-friendliness of Ariba Guided Buying? However, do you miss the possibility to easily place limit orders for example, the energy bill, lease or other ongoing services and goods? Then there is good news! Since the November release of 2020 it is possible to place limit orders in Guided Buying.
Since the previous release in August 2020, limit orders were already available within the buying & invoicing environment. Unfortunately, this did not work if you also use Guided Buying, therefore the solution was not yet applicable in many organizations. This has changed since November and every user can now easily create the limit orders in Guided Buying. The big advantage of limit orders is that you can invoice up to the requested amount in the order, without having to post goods receipts for it.
Do you wonder how to activate this for your users? After the support department of Ariba has enabled the necessary parameters, the administrator can indicate whether a commodity code already present in the system may also be used as a limit order. You don’t have to do more than that and the users can get started.
The end user can create a free text just like in the current situation. As soon as the chosen commodity code may also be used for the limit order, the following outlined part of the screen will become available. In this part of the screen, users can indicate whether the request concerns a limit order, which amounts and dates apply.
Completing the shopping cart and any workflow is exactly the same as when a regular free text request is created. Furthermore, nothing changes for the requester and the user-friendliness of Guided Buying is again improved.
The direct integration with your SAP ECC or S4 / Hana system is also available. As you can see in the picture below, the limit item is created in your back-end with the expected item type B.
You will also see that an invoice has been posted in the purchase order history without a goods receipt in return. In addition, the limits tab will become available with the applicable values.
Do you think that requesting limit orders in Ariba Guided Buying could be a valuable addition to your organization or do you have questions about the use of limit orders in general? Please feel free to contact Compera and we will be happy to tell you more about the possibilities.