Rich’s: Improving vendor relationships and maximizing strategic spend with SAP Ariba solutions
Using technology to create confectionery delights
Frozen and prepared offerings from multinational food giant Rich Products Corporation (Rich’s) can be found in major retail stores around the globe. With SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Business Network, Rich’s is managing its vendor relationships so it can onboard suppliers more quickly and maintain supplier data all in one place.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products—food | Buffalo, New York | 11,000 employees |
to onboard new suppliers, down from three months.
in spend running through SAP Ariba solutions.
touchless invoices in one year through accounts payable.
Procurement Operations Director, Rich Products Corporation
Increasing insight into procure-to-pay processes and data
Rich Products Corporation (Rich’s) is a family-owned multinational food company founded in 1945, offering well-known brands available at local supermarkets. The company values innovation as part of its culture, which enables Rich’s to sell more than 2,000 products in 112 countries and work with thousands of suppliers around the globe. But disparate and manual supplier relationship management systems and processes resulted in a lack of visibility across procurement.
Rich’s needed to see and compare detailed procure-to-pay data at the line-item level to understand how it could maximize savings and identify strategic supplier opportunities and policies across the organization. It also needed a faster way to onboard new suppliers to streamline a process that could take up to three months.
Finally, it needed to be able to see what it was buying in advance—not after the purchase was highlighted through delivery of an invoice.
And all of this had to happen at a global scale.
Supplier Enablement Lead, Rich Products Corporation
Unifying procurement data and vendor management in one system
As a longtime SAP customer, Rich’s chose SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Business Network to transform and standardize its procure-to-pay operations. Phase one was to deploy the SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance solution, then the SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing solution. It also deployed SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite and the guided buying capability.
SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance enables a strategic onboarding program for vendors so they can be contacted and registered in a single online step.
SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite helps the company align and transact with suppliers in real time.
Rich’s is also deploying the SAP Spend Control Tower solution, which will allow it to gather supplier and transactional data from global SAP systems and put it in one place. Then it can enrich that data to gain an accurate depiction of procurement across the organization.
Procurement Operations Director, Rich Products Corporation
Improving supplier connections to tighten relationships and maximize savings
With its new SAP Ariba system in place, Rich’s is now able to manage its vendors through the registration and onboarding program in just seven days—compared to the three months it took before.
Having centralized, real-time data and a user-friendly self-service vendor portal means that Rich’s associates can better serve vendors, making for stronger trading relationships from purchase order through invoicing. Everything from gathering vendor tax information to remittances, payments, and even requesting ACH banking information is streamlined—saving time for the company’s staff and vendors alike. Touchless invoices are saving time for accounts payable as well.
The reduced onboarding time also means suppliers are able to buy more quickly than before, leading to a faster turnaround.
Finally, the new system is enabling Rich’s to be more strategic based on category management and catalog data, giving it the visibility to better manage spending and plan budgeting end to end across the organization.
Procurement Operations Director, Rich Products Corporation
Taking the supplier onboarding program global
Since deploying SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Business Network, Rich’s has run more than US$800 million in spend through the system, with a target of $450 million for the current year in the United States and Canada. With the implementation of SAP Spend Control Tower, Rich’s will be able to harness AI-enabled spend classification and supplier enrichment on one dataset to further enhance its program and more effectively reduce procurement costs and supplier risk.