Supplier insight – including understanding the risks your suppliers bring to the table regardless of where they’re located - is the backbone to effective supplier risk management. Fast access to quality supplier information puts you in a much stronger position to make informed decisions to reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions on your business – and maybe emerge even stronger.

The world events of last year, from the tsunami in Japan to the financial turmoil in Europe, were a wake-up call to companies that managing supplier risk – across boundaries – needs to be a top priority. This realization has led to a shift in thinking, from asking, “What is supplier risk management?” to “How can I better manage supplier risk?”

At D&B we realize the importance of seeing the entire supplier picture. And, through our partnership with Ariba, you have access to information on more than 205 million businesses in more than 200 countries, helping you get ahead of unwelcome supplier surprises.

To best prepare for supplier disruptions, you need to anticipate them. Before the unexpected happens, ask yourself:

1. How quickly can I access reliable information about the situation?
2. How thoroughly can I analyze the information to understand how the situation affects me?
3. How confidently can I make decisions about what to do and act on those choices?

Having a more complete picture of a supplier enables you to answer these questions. And, supplier insight extends its value beyond risk management. It can help you:

• Navigate the shifting sands of the global economy
• Elevate supplier diversity strategies
• Meet government and industry compliance mandates
• Move into new markets with an expanded supply base
• Accelerate product innovation and more

Later this month, Susan Walter, D&B Global Relationship Manager for Ariba, will be participating with Bausch & Lomb in the Ariba Live Barcelona panel discussion “Efficient Spend Analytics to Drive Sourcing Pipeline and Savings”. Please join them on May 31^st at 11:45 a.m. to hear more about overcoming spend visibility challenges for more effective supplier management. 

And, to learn more about what we’re hearing from customers about supplier risk, check out our conversation with Susan Avery of My Purchasing Center at the ISM conference.

Hi all,

Many of you recently participated in the customer-only SIPM 13s1 Feature Survey.  We will be posting the compiled results of that survey shortly in the Customer Success group.  This group is private to Ariba customers only.  The 13s1 feature survey results will only be available via this group, so register as soon as possible we'll get you approved so you can view the results.  Thanks!

http://exchange.ariba.com/groups/customer-success

Thank you to those of you who attended this Webinar.  Below are a few of the questions from the sessions with their corresponding answers.  The full list of questions and answers from the session is attached to this post.  Please feel free to use Ariba Exchange to respond to this post and interact with your peers.  We look forward to speaking with you again in a future session!

Question: Is there a way to generate a report to include all types of contract workspaces (Internal, Procurement, and Sales)?

Answer:   Yes, simply select "general workspace" as your fact table.

Question: Is there a way to run a report to show the list of all the documents that are uploaded in the document tab of the Contract Workspace? The reason for asking this question is, this would help us in migrating contracts easily.

Answer: No, currently there is no functionality to report on documents.

Question: Can you generate a report of the items in a Contract Workspace?

Answer: Yes, you can report on fields in a contract workspace using the Contract workspace fact tables or report on tasks in the workflow by selecting the project task fact table if that is what you mean by items.

Question: products in a contract/project

Answer: This would be a field on the Sales Contract workspace and "yes" is it reportable.

Question: Can we run a report to capture approval duration of a particular project?

Answer: Yes, you can report on this by using the project task fact table and reporting on the approval tasks by using the name or type of the task as page filters.  Then, you can use "average duration" as your measure field.  This will calculate the number of days it took to complete a task.  For an approval task, this would mean the amount of days between when the approval task was submitted and when it was finally approved.