SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite
Boost efficiency with strategic sourcing for manufacturers and retailers
Process manufacturers, retailers, and discrete manufacturers that rely on external manufacturers can capture more savings by improving source-to-contract processes and supplier collaboration with a sourcing suite that supports industry-specific processes and systems.
SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite can help you integrate sourcing, contracting, and supplier management on a unified platform and source key spend types – improving cycle time while driving contract compliance and immediate savings.
SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite can help you integrate sourcing, contracting, and supplier management on a unified platform and source key spend types – improving cycle time while driving contract compliance and immediate savings.
Key Benefits
Experience the advantages of a single platform
Upgrade the quality and performance of sourcing, contracting, and supplier management for industries while reducing costs.
Enhance your bottom line with strategic sourcing
Gain visibility, optimize segment spend, and identify savings opportunities while standardizing source-to-contract processes across teams and business units.
Support a closed-loop, source-to-contract process
Improve process efficiencies, capture more savings, and minimize supplier-selection risks with a single sourcing, contracting, and supplier management solution.
Key Features
Explore how discrete and process manufacturers and retailers can benefit from the integrated processes of SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite.
Electronic RFx and bid comparisons
Use RFx and project management tools with workflows, document management, and approvals to get bids and award suppliers.
Outsourced manufacturing and BOM collaboration
Collaborate on bills of materials and engineering change notifications with manufacturing partners and easily compare bills of materials (BOMs).
360-degree view of supply
Increase transparency with a 360-degree view of material price history and trends, sourcing activities, and sources of supply.
Integration to PLM systems
Integrate with product lifecycle management (PLM) processes and systems for importing BOMs and engineering change notifications.
ERP integration with operational procurement
Achieve compliance with contracts and other follow-on documents by integrating with operational procurement processes.
Cost breakdown analysis
Identify potential savings by configuring cost breakdowns using complex costing information collected from suppliers.
SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite: A Solution for Discrete Manufacturing
Discover how discrete manufacturers can accelerate the sourcing process and optimize direct spend costs during product development and subsequent cost-out programs with SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite.
Total landed cost calculation and governance
Calculate total costs – including logistics, import duties, and taxes – to compare prices with international commercial terms.
Greater quality through collaboration
Improve the quality of recipes, BOMs, and product specs by working directly with suppliers and external manufacturers.
Comprehensive process management
Use RFx and project management tools with workflows, document management, and approvals to solicit bids and award business.
Material 360
Gain insights into material price history and trends, sourcing activities, and sources of supply.
Cost breakdown analysis
Identify potential savings by configuring cost breakdowns using complex costing information collected from suppliers.
ERP integration
Generate compliant follow-on documents, such as purchase information records and documents with advanced pricing conditions.
SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite: A Solution for Process Manufacturers
Discover how process manufacturers can accelerate the sourcing process and optimize direct spend costs with SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite. Learn how it supports collaboration across recipes, ingredients, and product quality with external manufacturers and raw material and ingredient suppliers.
Simplified RFx development
Create comprehensive RFQs in minutes by automatically populating attribute and category information from back-end systems.
Retail system integration
Integrate with key retail systems, including article master data with generic articles and variants and pricing conditions.
Automation of repetitive processes
Automate sourcing processes for fresh and perishable products that are regularly reordered, such as fruits and vegetables.
Improved sustainability performance
Gain greater visibility into suppliers’ operations to develop insights that help improve corporate responsibility compliance.
Electronic RFQ and bid comparisons
Help retailers find savings in private-label product production with RFQs and analyses that detail complex costing information.
SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite: A Solution for Retailers
Discover how retailers like you can more easily source private label products and fresh produce and related goods for resale products and services with SAP Strategic Sourcing Suite.
See how customers are succeeding with SAP
Build a business case
Learn how we can help you expedite sourcing events
Get an overview of guided sourcing, the intuitive user experience that simplifies indirect sourcing event creation and management.
Dive deeper into the guided sourcing capability
Review this comprehensive set of questions and answers to understand benefits, implementation, parameters, and usage.
Boost efficiency with strategic sourcing
See how industry peers build business advantage by using digital technologies to improve source-to-pay performance.
Technical Information
Use SAP Business Technology Platform with this cloud solution to gain visibility, extend applications, and integrate your source-to-pay processes.
Visibility
Unlock spend data with solutions that deliver total spend visibility, aid in planning and forecasting, and connect critical data from SAP and third-party sources.
Extensibility
Customize and extend the value of spend management solutions by eliminating inefficiencies, building new apps, enhancing existing apps, and providing personalized experiences.
Integration
Centralize data, remove silos, and create a connected enterprise with integration solutions from SAP, streamlining your source-to-pay process with prebuilt connections.
Get Started
Jump-start your SAP solution implementation and drive ROI by collaborating with industry experts, consultants, and support engineers throughout your journey.
Services
Transform your business quickly and effectively by taking advantage of our holistic service and support plans, expert consulting services, custom application development, proven best practices, and deep industry and technical knowledge.
Support
Explore the learning center, engage in discussion forums, and create service requests in SAP Ariba Connect for solution power users and digital support contacts.
Security and compliance
Focus on your business and customer relationships, while keeping your data safe and reliable. SAP takes a proactive, predictive approach to maintaining compliance and data security in the cloud and within an on-premise data center.
Frequently Asked Questions
Strategic sourcing is a series of collaborative procurement processes that includes spend data collection and analysis, supplier management and category management, sourcing, and contract management. Strategic sourcing solutions are available in application suites as integrated solutions that help procurement professionals and organizations:
- Understand detailed spend profiles
- Discover the right savings opportunities
- Identify, onboard, and perform continuous management, evaluation, and qualification of suppliers to help support diversity, sustainability, cost reduction, and reliability objectives in today’s volatile marketplace
- Execute negotiation activities and tasks, from tendering to contract negotiation, enabling compliance and collaboration among multiple company stakeholders, delivering sustainable savings, and reducing supply chain risk
- Operationalize negotiated agreements, helping ensure a consistent realization of their value
Strategic sourcing is important because its processes and capabilities help organizations increase compliant spend, achieve significant cost savings, and drive strategic value across the enterprise.
While sourcing is a tactical, transactional activity driven by near-term, specific requisition needs, strategic sourcing addresses the holistic sourcing needs of an organization using processes such as data collection and analysis, category management, and supplier discovery and evaluation, including tendering and contract management activities.
As a result, strategic sourcing can better help organizations identify cost-cutting opportunities, define and execute supplier selection processes, analyze supplier responses, and negotiate competitively priced contracts.
Purchasing is a business process organizations use to acquire essential products and services in a timely, cost-effective way. Strategic sourcing takes a more holistic approach that involves collecting data, analyzing costing and prices, collaborating deeply with suppliers, conducting market research, and negotiating competitively priced contracts.
Purchasing focuses on obtaining goods at the lowest price, often by maximizing order quantity and discounts. Strategic sourcing seeks to create better procurement efficiency, minimize supplier risk, increase compliant spend, and achieve significant cost savings.
Strategic sourcing can be improved by using solutions that help organizations:
- Understand detailed spend for everyday expenses
- Gain access to a reliable global network of suppliers
- Identify and qualify suppliers that can effectively support diversity, sustainability, cost-efficiencies, and, most important, reliability
- Develop a strategic sourcing program, including new supplier information and appropriate onboarding processes, to help organizations find high-performing suppliers
- Support process and category best practices with knowledgeable resources
- Enable confident sourcing with proper market, commodity, operational, and contractual information
- Support quick, straightforward access to strategy and category expertise, helping organizations realize greater value in everyday procurement