Anypoint Platform for Ariba Integration
Business Requirements
Procurement is a key function of every business. It takes care of the operational needs of the business such as goods and services provided by suppliers and MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations). Various parties get involved in the procurement processes including employees as buyers and approvers, accounting, finance and suppliers.
Procurement processes span across multiple phases starting from planning to sourcing to procurement. There are a few COTS solutions available but the most popular is SAP Ariba that covers end to end procurement processes. However each of the procurement phases needs multiple integrations with various systems outside of Ariba such as ERPs, Ticketing, Asset Management, HR Systems, Contract Systems, Expense Management, Account Payables, Payments and Data Warehouse/Reporting.
One of the most commonly found challenges across organizations is complex and unmanageable point to point integrations embedded within the procurement processes that leads to inflexibility to change source and target systems as well as lowers process level visibility.
Additionally, SAP Ariba is now transitioned to cloud and all Ariba customers are forced to migrate their on-prem Ariba systems to the cloud by 2020. This migration is complex and challenging and the p2p integrations make it even harder.
How Anypoint Platform helps
The Anypoint Platform enables organizations to eliminate deeply embedded p2p integrations inside various procurement processes. Through an API-led architecture the Anypoint Platform decouples the systems and processes layers providing the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs quickly and efficiently, enables reuse for faster time to market for new integrations and provides end to end visibility into the procurement processes.
The Anypoint Platform provides more than 200 connectors for out-of-the-box connectivity as well as the ability to build custom connectors for a variety of systems involved in the integration of procurement processes. These connectors enable all of the systems involved in the procurement processes to be accessed via standards based HTTP/REST APIs. The process layer simply uses the systems APIs to standardize the procurement processes. This eliminates p2p integration, increases reuse and allows changing underlying systems with newer systems without impacting the procurement processes.
In addition to the above, the hybrid deployment architecture of the Anypoint Platform allows organizations to flexibly deploy the integrations on-prem or in the cloud as needed and also move the integrations seamlessly between on-prem and cloud thereby future proofing the architecture.
Use case studies
Improving expense to revenue ratio and increasing speed of delivery by 4x at a large bank
Anypoint Platform helped a large bank increase project delivery speed by 4x helping the bank improve expense to revenue ratio through transforming its software delivery and management capabilities. Existing p2p and custom integration approaches could not meet the desired speed of delivery and scale across the entire bank.
Apart from many other requirements, smealessing integrating the procurement processes with back office systems and aligning with SAP Ariba’s transition from on-prem to cloud was one of the key requirements to improve expense to revenue ratio.
Using Anypoint Platform the bank delivered following:
- Seamlessly integrate Ariba on-prem, Ariba on-demand in the cloud, SAP Asset Management, Risk Engine, Oracle ERP, Concur, PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain to automate sourcing to procurement to payment processes for B2B and B2C use cases
- Delivered data to bank’s enterprise Data Warehouse and Reporting engine on Microstrategy
- Following a robust API led architecture, the bank is able to smoothly transition procurement processes from Ariba on-prem using Integration Toolkit to Ariba on-demand using Cloud Integration Gateway and migrate integrations from on-prem Oracle ERP to Oracle ERP Cloud
- Built an application network of 500+ applications connected through reusable APIs
- The integrated procurement processes are processing 8,000 invoices every hr, managing $250B worth of transactions every year and 30,000 users depend upon it.
3x faster speed of delivery and increased agility at a large CPG company
This large CPG company was looking to develop a best-of-breed platform for eCommerce that unifies their portfolio of multiple brands on a common operating model. The company has multiple global teams and was looking to find more efficient solutions to deploy new products and services faster. This required the company to consolidate technologies and move to cloud.
They had a number of use cases; adopting SaaS applications, integrating across public and private clouds, cloud eCommerce, integrating social media sentiment data from cloud, and consolidating 36 different call center technologies into Salesforce. As demand on IT increased, they faced a growing backlog for hybrid integration across systems like SAP Ariba and Salesforce. The Anypoint Platform has helped them move 3x faster leveraging over 200 pre-built connectors, developing a network of 100s of APIs, and create a reusable API led integrations that drive long-term agility.
Contract process automation for a large oil & gas company
A large oil & gas company is using Anypoint Platform to integrate and automate their contract management process. Before using Anypoint Platform, the contracts were manually entered in Allegro and a scanned copy of the physical contract uploaded manually into a file system. The company acquired SAP Ariba for process improvements and automation and integrated it with Allegro using Anypoint Platform. Now contracts are initiated in Ariba and automatically created in Allegro along with storing the scanned copy in a file system storage. The reusable APIs and API led architecture allowed the company to quickly extend the integrations to more systems in the future such as GIS and Aries.
References
Anypoint Platform hybrid integration approach