Here are some of the over 70 features from the 2402 release (February 2024) for SAP Ariba and the SAP Business Network that I think are especially cool. Please comment on any you think should be on the list.
- Accelerating Enterprise Category Strategy Development with Generative AI-Enhanced Content Recommenda... – Pro Tip: Don’t tell your boss that you are enabling this feature. That way as you start leveraging the AI capabilities and including all the cool competitive data and visualizations you can take complete credit for your category management superpowers. That and who doesn’t want to talk Porter’s Five Forces at your next party. Legendary.
- New Supplier Profile Summary [NGSM-2959] – The new summary screen is built on SAP BTP, which you may or may not care about. What you do care about is that moving forward this technology is the same for all SAP products which means you get a consistent look & feel across the SAP portfolio translating to less training and faster adoption by your users. On top of that, on this new summary page there is a new link showing off operational procurement data directly from S/4. This new profile will continue to add new features and transition from the existing capabilities over the next few releases to be that single pane of glass for all the activities and data for that supplier and as you would expect is popping up directly in other modules.
- Automated User Experience Survey in Guided Buying [GB-24766] – I will admit that this one is cool but caused me to pause. The idea that the business user masses can provide a direct feedback link to the product team is incredible and has a huge potential to streamline product updates. I am balancing that optimism with a sincere wonder of how many of the dissatisfied users will be commenting on their dissatisfaction with company policies and approval requirements. (Spoiler Alert: We can’t fix that.)
- Allow Suppliers to Add Carbon Emission Data Related to the Network Catalog Products [BNCAT-2027] -- This feature is for suppliers doing the right thing and helping them to be more competitive for it. What is not to like?
- Ability to Create SAP Business Network Discovery Postings for Guided Sourcing [SS-46843] – As a buyer, it is always resource intensive to find suppliers to compete as we tend to pick the usual suspects especially in familiar categories. This feature for Guided Sourcing customers allows to quickly find and ingest new suppliers into your events saving a bunch of time.
After all that you may also be wondering about the picture. Okay, I accept that I am shamelessly cheating with this picture to maybe get a little attention for the blog. It is a pic of my 13 year old daughter and while at the grocery store picking up things for her favorite dinner I got her a stuffed koala bear and a can of bubble tea in advance of an evening together where I was hoping to spend good "Koala-Tea" time (say it out loud). Why is it posted here? Because these blog posts suggest you add a picture and I spent WAY too much time agonizing over our image library on search terms of "feature" or "release" or "software" or "procurement" when I really should have been upstairs with my family.
Have a great day. Thanks for reading, and I hope you get to spend some koala-tea time with your family.
