Get this built-in capability with SAP Ariba procurement solutions
Available at no additional cost with SAP Ariba Buying and SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, guided buying gives your employees a simple, elegant way to buy smarter. It’s an intuitive experience that leads them to follow procurement guidelines and best practices – without the need to know them before they shop.
Guided buying helps you boost user adoption to reduce savings leakage and maverick spend, while it helps your employees to:
- Easily buy from your preferred suppliers the goods and services they need to do their jobs
- Effectively and efficiently collaborate with suppliers and category experts
- Quickly complete purchasing transactions
- Effortlessly comply with your purchasing policies and procedures
Product Features


Real-time guidance
Users know while shopping when a purchasing or budget policy is violated, rather than finding out after submitting a request. You set rules that may allow them to proceed with the exception or require a different purchase.
Cost savings
Through greater compliance, less savings leakage, and easier supplier collaboration, significant savings can be allocated to more strategic organizational initiatives.
Supplier management and collaboration
Integration with other SAP Ariba solutions facilitates both supplier management and collaboration on one-off purchases, with the ability to select preferred suppliers as well as request quotes via Ariba Network.
Internal collaboration
Based on what the user is buying and where the user is located, guided buying gives instant access to the category expert in that user’s purchasing unit.
Persona-based dashboards
The guided buying capability can be flexibly configured to align forms, permissions, and system behavior for each user, presenting them with customized tiles and categories to streamline purchasing.
Help community
Exclusive guided buying help community provides the framework to provide targeted help content to users and make it easy for them to collaborate efficiently during their purchasing process.
Resources


Read the reportSAP continues to enhance its procurement application suite through its enhanced strategic relationship with iCertis, the acquisition of working capital management firm Taulia, and the launch of the SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
What is guided buying?
Guided buying is a procurement principle that aims to ease the employee purchasing and employee spending process. Guided buying provides a one-stop portal for employees within an organization. And it’s persona-based. This means that an admin of the company can appoint certain profiles to various individuals throughout the organization as needed. These profiles have a certain amount of access and limitation based on users and their level in the organization, as well as the types of purchases they’ll be making regularly. Then, individuals can make preapproved purchases on a rolling basis with almost no involvement from the procurement team.
Guided buying increases compliant spend by steering users to preferred suppliers while incorporating guardrails so that users follow procurement policies without having to know them in advance. The procurement department can also offer tailored help content in situations where users need more guidance.
-
What is SAP Ariba guided buying?
SAP Ariba guided buying is a persona-based user experience that makes it simpler for users to find what they’re looking for. Users outside of the professional procurement group have one place to search for goods and services in a consumer-like way and can make purchases using a simple interface.
Guided buying in SAP Ariba solutions is a free capability that steers users to compliant procurement processes. Available with the SAP Ariba Buying or the SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing solutions, it is also integrated with the Spot Buy capability in SAP Ariba solutions.
Related Solutions
The guided buying capability comes built-in with these SAP procurement solutions.
SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing
SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing is a best-in-class, easy-to-use procure-to-pay solution that helps companies effectively manage all spend-related processes and ensure negotiated savings reach the bottom line.
More about procure-to-paySAP Ariba Buying
Choose this solution to automate your procure-to-order process and integrate with your back-end system to let your ERP handle invoice and payment processing.
More about procure-to-order