Supplier participation is essential to the success of your collaborative commerce program.

Whether your suppliers participate in the program depends on the establishment and communication of your Collaborative Commerce Compliance Policy, and the extent to which people in your company are equipped to enforce it. Ensuring the latter requires attention to four things:

1. Resources: Key roles and responsibilities

2. Stakeholders

3. Program cadence

4. Communication

1.  Resources: Key roles and responsibilities

Identify the key individuals involved and define the portion of their time they should dedicate to the program. This table contains an organizational structure that has proven most effective:

Download PDF for more detailed descriptions of these roles and their responsibilities.

2. Stakeholders

To help ensure stakeholders are engaged in the program, hold a meeting with them before you begin the process of onboarding suppliers to Ariba Network. The purpose of the meeting is twofold: to discuss the new collaborative commerce solution and its implementation program, and to confirm organization-wide understanding and consensus on:

• How implementation will help achieve the company’s goals

• The company’s policy for complying with the program, and ramifications for not doing so

• Each stakeholder’s role in helping to ensure compliance

• The key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure progress

Your customer engagement executive and other SAP Ariba representatives can help you plan your meeting objectives and agenda. (For an example agenda, click here.)

3.  Program cadence

Things change over time: your supply base, the scope of your projects, and a host of other internal and external factors and influences. That is one reason your collaborative commerce initiative is not a short-term project but an ongoing program.

It’s very important that we help you develop a sequence of events and a timeline to reach your goals and sustain your results. Here are some things to keep in mind:

• After your initial launch, there should be a rolling go-live process to enable remaining suppliers in “waves.”

• Waves should be scheduled weekly or bi-weekly to maintain momentum.

• Complete each wave as soon as possible to avoid overlap of wave activities.

Download this chart to see a program cadence timeline example. 

4.  Communication

Delivering conflicting messages is the easiest way to jeopardize supplier participation. For example, a supplier who receives a notice asking them to join Ariba Network may call your organization to inquire about it. If they reach someone who says they aren’t familiar with the program or don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about, the supplier will probably not comply — now or in the future.

To ensure program success, you must communicate with your leadership team, employees, peers, and any other internal teams affected by your collaborative commerce initiative.

Communicate these three points:

1. We are changing the way we do business.

2. This change is not an exercise or short-term project. The program is a fundamental change to our business. We will not return to a paper-based process after our Ariba Network deployment.

3. Every employee and supplier, regardless of their role, is expected to understand how they are affected by the program and do their part to ensure the program’s success.

Internal Change Management

Inform stakeholders about the launch of your collaborative commerce program and encourage their buy-in.

People in your organization are more likely to use SAP Ariba solutions when they understand how they and the company can benefit from them. So, try encapsulating those benefits into something like an elevator pitch or mission statement. Use it whenever you talk or write about your SAP Ariba solutions and services.

A good starting point is to think about why you first engaged SAP Ariba. You probably wanted to save time and money and learned that you could so through greater efficiency, stronger compliance, and better cash and working capital management.

The table below outlines some of the most common ways that companies can achieve those benefits by using SAP Ariba to automate trading partner transactions and collaboration.

There may be other reasons you started working with SAP Ariba. Reach out to your customer engagement executive for help exploring and articulating those reasons. Include key colleagues, stakeholders, and leaders in your discussions. Together, you can draft your statement of purpose and start incorporating it into your communications.

Follow this step-by-step process

Measuring and communicating the progress and effectiveness of your collaborative commerce initiative are critical to the program’s long-term success. Experience tells us that it’s very important to adhere to a specific series of steps, at least initially, to define and implement your measurement program.

These six steps are:

1. Identifying the program’s leaders, users, and other stakeholders, including executive sponsors. If you’re not sure who the sponsors are, answer this question: Who “wrote the check” for the program?

2. Making sure everyone clearly understands and aligns with the challenges, objectives, and goals that led to the initiative.

3. Working together to establish KPIs in line with your objectives and goals. While there are many things that can be measured, focus initially on the metrics in the table below. Select the metrics most applicable to your situation.

4. Defining your current-state baselines.

5. Implementing incentives to ensure alignment of resource goals and program goals.

6. Reporting (and reporting, and reporting) your results.