Harmonizing procurement across 24 global businesses to enhance visibility, sustainability, and supplier collaboration
Explore Adani’s journey with SAP
Multinational conglomerate Adani Enterprises Limited needed to simplify and harmonize complex and siloed procurement operations. A centralized platform based on SAP Business Network and SAP Ariba solutions combines consistent procurement processes with the freedom to develop the applications Adani needs to create sustainable value and grow.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Cross-industry | Ahmedabad, India | 43,000 employees |
first-time-right invoices in digital channels.
hours saved in one year in processing invoices.
pieces of paper saved in one year with supplier digitalization.
Group Head of Business Excellence and Strategic Initiatives, Adani Enterprises Limited
Simplifying procurement operations in a multifaceted business
The scale of operations at multinational conglomerate Adani Enterprises Limited is vast. A portfolio of 10 publicly traded companies spans more than 50 lines of business, such as transportation and logistics, energy and utilities, airports, and materials.
In keeping with its “Growth with Goodness” philosophy, Adani places high importance on sustainability. It has adopted many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to support efforts ranging from decarbonizing power generation to conserving mangrove forests.
Against this very complex backdrop, Adani wanted to transform its procurement processes by building a centralized platform for 24 of its businesses. There were three main drivers behind the project. First, the company wanted to ensure it had the systems, capabilities, and people in place to support growth.
Second, it wanted to harmonize processes. Mukesh Ralhan, the company’s group head of business excellence and strategic initiatives, explains, “We rely heavily on suppliers, and sourcing is core to our day-to-day business. However, we were living in silos. Each business, be it solar, defense, ports, or airports, had its own way of working. We needed to get one version of the truth and use one software solution across the board. In doing so, we wanted to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach and harmonize rather than standardize. This meant certain things would be core to each of the 24 businesses but with allowance for some customization too.”
A third driver was the need to encourage external stakeholders to digitalize as well. “Our digital transformation needed to create real value for people outside our ‘circle of influence,’ like suppliers, vendors, or partners, so they would join us in our journey and help make it a success,” says Ralhan.
Group Head of Business Excellence and Strategic Initiatives, Adani Enterprises Limited
Building an integrated procure-to-pay platform with flexibility to grow
Adani decided SAP Business Network and a range of SAP Ariba solutions were the right choices to underpin the group’s procurement transformation.
Ralhan notes, “SAP Ariba solutions come with very strong sourcing capabilities. We believed they were a fit not just for today but also for tomorrow because of their integration with each other and their compatibility with offerings such as SAP Fieldglass solutions.”
Adani implemented the SAP Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, SAP Ariba Contracts, and SAP Ariba Spend Analysis solutions. Also key to its transformation was the SAP Business Network Commerce Automation solution.
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) played an important part in integrating the new procurement landscape. CIO Tarang Bhargava says, “Every business has different demands, and we had tried to meet these demands in the core. When we realized we had to go beyond this, we decided to explore SAP BTP.” According to Ralhan, SAP BTP would enable the freedom to offer bespoke applications, such as approval workflows, within the framework of policies and procedures provided by SAP Ariba solutions.
Adani worked with SAP MaxAttention services to support its transformation. Ralhan says two approaches helped maximize adoption among its 10,000 suppliers. “Borrow brilliance” involved working with experts for SAP Ariba solutions to identify suppliers that already used the solutions and would need less training before onboarding. Adani also adopted a “clean cheating” approach in which it asked suppliers for help in training their own communities on the solutions. To boost adoption further, Adani built a supplier information portal containing information sheets and brief how-to videos.
Helping both internal procurement teams and suppliers excel
Adani’s procurement platform now supports more than 1,700 supply chain employees and over 22,000 suppliers. It is not surprising, given the group’s wide reach, that the numbers involved are impressive. For example, SAP Business Network Commerce Automation handled US$3 billion in purchase orders (POs) in the last financial year, up 269% on the previous year. It accounted for more than 200,000 invoices (up 163%) and US$2 billion in spend (up 83%). Every month, the company processes 13,000 to 14,000 POs, 35,000 to 36,000 invoices, and 38,000 to 40,000 goods received notes (GRNs) or service entry sheets using SAP Ariba solutions.
Adani now has a comprehensive overview of its purchasing activities. Ralhan notes, “We know how many POs we punch per day and per buyer and what our average spend is. So, we have complete visibility into that. Our suppliers have done fantastic work in bringing invoices into SAP Ariba solutions, reducing a lot of rework at our end.”
SAP Ariba Sourcing provides a one-stop shop for sourcing information, offers robust version control, and helps reduce sourcing cycle times and administrative costs. It gives Adani access to deeper purchasing insights, benchmarking data, and analytics. The company can also better enforce spend controls using business rules and co-location strategies.
With SAP Business Network Commerce Automation, Adani benefits from automated procurement transactions and workflows as well as improved procurement compliance. It can track advanced shipping notices, GRNs, payables, and rejected invoices efficiently online, and it can collaborate more effectively with partners. As Ralhan says, “This was all about creating transparency for our suppliers. We gained speed but also brought value to suppliers by enabling transparency across payouts and working capital management to enable them to make better decisions that, in turn, help us grow our business.”
What’s more, SAP Ariba solutions support Adani’s sustainability goals in measurable ways. Eliminating 8.5 million pieces of paper in one year helped the company meet its chosen UN SDGs by saving 1,025 trees as well as water, waste, energy, and CO2.
Meanwhile, SAP BTP lets Adani’s businesses develop tools that meet their specific needs within the harmonized procurement platform. Bhargava describes three current use cases, one involving the reconciliation of vendor material at open-air warehouses for the green energy business. The second involves an expediting portal that supports third-party inspection, logistics, and import collaboration for containers and materials in the petrochemicals business. And a third use case involves integration with SAP Ariba solutions. Bhargava explains, “We pick up the data from SAP Ariba solutions, take it to SAP BTP, run an approval workflow, create templates, and push it back to SAP Ariba solutions. The user experience is so smooth that people don’t even notice they’ve navigated out of SAP Ariba solutions to SAP BTP and back again.”
Innovating on the basis of robust procurement operations
Adani is now building on its new procurement platform to enable further efficiency and innovation.
For instance, the company is looking at how it can use SAP Digital Boardroom to achieve a single, centralized view of its transactions on SAP Ariba solutions.
Another plan is to use SAP Ariba Contracts to help with boundary setting in contract governance.
Whatever direction these explorations take, SAP solutions will help the company achieve sustainable “Growth with Goodness” far into the future.