Ariba LIVE was held this week in Washington DC and the analyst team from Ardent Partners was there in full force. Yes, just us and 2,000 customers, staffers, partners, sponsors, media types, and other analysts from rival firms like Forrester & Gartner. It was the first LIVE event since SAP acquired Ariba last year and while there were many great presentations (one of which I’ll review today) and interesting announcements (many of which the Ardent team will review next week), it was very striking to me how similar this LIVE was to those in years past.

Ariba LIVE remains the spend/supply management industry’s premier event both for its overall size and for its depth and breadth of quality. Ariba’s ability to bring together such a large audience of senior procurement and finance professionals and engage them with best practices, solution plans, and its own vision for the future should ensure that SAP allows it to continue and continue unchanged.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Journey

Suzanne Young, Executive General Manager, Strategy and Operations for Institutional Banking and Markets at Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the first customer keynote at the conference. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (“CBA”) is the largest bank and the second largest company in Australia when looking at market capitalization. Suzanne relayed in her words, “a journey that was not just about the technology. It was about how we could make a significant difference to the businesses we support within the Commonwealth Bank. How we could return to that proposition of adding value to that business.” Suzanne also shared part of her own journey from the daughter of farmers and the first in her family to attend college to an executive at both Unisys and Qantas before joining the bank in 2010.

It was in 2010 that the decision was made to migrate Ariba’s installed solution into the cloud as part of an general system upgrade. The migration was also part of a larger procurement transformation project that was going to address many of procurement’s challenges including too many suppliers, no engagement with business stakeholders, and less than 10% of all contracts stored and accessible. The project also targeted $250 million in savings over the first five years. From the start, the project had four primary pillars: (1) strategy & governance (2) sourcing & category management (3) P2p & (4) SRM.

It was at this point in her presentation that Suzanne basically ‘fast-forwarded’ to today where the updated results are that after three years, the project will have generated $205 million in savings.The project has also helped the procurement team restructure itself into a center-led organization (one that uses the Ariba cloud solutions). Suzanne also noted that the supply base is 70% smaller and includes more than 300 suppliers on the Ariba Network. Additionally, Suzanne says that the bank now has visibility into all of the contracts for its top 90% of suppliers.

Despite these successes, Suzanne says there is still more to do – the bank now needs to fully embrace the Ariba Network, develop another multiyear plan, begin to integrate future and planned gains into the budgeting process, and to focus on and develop supplier innovation and productivity gains.

CBA chose to work with Ariba for this project (although the project was an upgrade, they considered other solutions) largely because of the Ariba team that sold and supported the project. Suzanne felt that the Ariba team was open, responsive, and highly collaborative; it was able to merge itself into a single integrated project team and helped lead the project from the development of the business case to its phased go-live (a process which tool about one year). Finally, in its decision-making process, the CBA thought that the Ariba solutions were vastly superior to all the others that were reviewed and in a side-by-side comparison with the other finalist, Oracle, felt that “it wasn’t close.”

As she concluded her presentation, Suzanne offered a few “leadership lessons:”

• If you want to achieve something big, you must have a bold plan
• Not all decisions are easy, but as a leader you must step in and make the tough calls when needed
• Execute like hell
• There is power in vibrant leadership
• Strong leaders must be curious and learn to listen
• For longer-term projects, you must find the right workload balance and pace – there must be urgency, but it must be sustainable.

We’ll be back next week with more from Ariba LIVE 2013.

Tagged in: Case Study, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, CPO Shop Talk, CPOs on the Rise, Solution Providers