Two weeks ago, I attended SAP Ariba’s annual user conference, Ariba Live, held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas with my colleagues, Andrew Bartolini and Bob Cohen. As in years past, corporate social responsibility (CSR), ethical sourcing, and sustainability featured prominently on the main stage as well as in breakout sessions and analyst-influencer sessions with the executive team. But unlike recent “Lives,” CSR seemed to be the theme of this year’s event, with SAP Ariba’s new President, Barry Padgett and innumerable Ariba executives giving impassioned presentations on “procurement with purpose,” and powerful guest speakers urging attendees to “dream big.”
In recent years, exciting technological breakthroughs and emerging business solutions, like Blockchain, were the stars of the show. They drove the conversations as speakers, attendees, and analysts discussed their business potential, inner workings and finer points, and how the technologies would achieve their objectives. And while there was ample technological discussion throughout the two-day event, it seemed secondary to the larger themes of “procurement with purpose” and “dreaming big.” Blockchain, Big Data, analytics, artificial (augmented) intelligence, and the network were put in their (rightful) place as enablers of achieving business objectives.
Put another way, all of these cool industry innovations are “just” business tools that procurement pros can use to drive positive change, not just save their companies money and improve their bottom lines. They can be used to source more ethically and responsibly, but also to connect people outside of the business world to life-changing resources. And as we found out at Live, SAP Ariba not only enables progressive business change, it also lives it.
Partnering for Change
On Day 1 of AribaLive, we sat in on an influencer executive roundtable featuring company officers from Ariba, Verisk Maplecroft, and EcoVadis. We will go into further discussion of Ariba’s partnerships with these firms in a follow-on article. But at a higher level, Ariba is striving to solve the Big Data problem for procurement with a little (or a lot) of help from its friends in the niche supply chain risk management sector.
As we have said many times on CPO Rising, there is a Big Data “crisis” befalling many procurement teams today: enterprises are awash in structured and unstructured data and struggle to make sense of it all. Also, it’s not the lack of data that hamstrings procurement, but the lack of quality data; and the lack of effective resources to analyze that data, particularly across business silos, and convert it to actionable business intelligence. According to Padmini Ranganathan, VP of products and innovation for supplier risk, compliance, and sustainability solutions at Ariba, it has developed data ingestion layers for the Ariba Network that enable its spend analytics and supply chain risk management applications to collect and analyze large, internal and external data sets. But it’s not as simple as that.
Ariba has partnered with Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk analytics company that works specifically with Big Data to distill complex supply risk issues into simple, digestible, and actionable insights. We heard from Erin McVeigh, head of products and data services at Maplecroft, on how it rates a company’s suppliers on a scale of 0-10 across four risk areas: economic, environmental, political, and social. Lately, said McVeigh, companies have been focusing on sustainability issues across all four of these risk areas. And they link their findings directly to the SAP Ariba Network, enabling users to access relevant and reliable supply chain risk intelligence across their supplier base, and to localize the risks within their supply chains.
Ariba has also partnered with Made in a Free World, a solutions provider that seeks to drive visibility into and awareness of modern slavery, human trafficking, and child labor in global supply chains. Made in a Free World collects Big Data from media sources, non-governmental organizations, and other sources, and combines it with country-risk factors to examine the prevalence of modern slavery and unsafe working conditions across supply chains. It, too, pipes its intelligence directly in Ariba’s Supplier Risk Management Tool and enables users to see overall incidences of modern slavery in their supply chains (there are an estimated 40 million men, women, and children in bondage today), but also drill down to geographic, category, and supplier level.
Like Verisk Maplecroft, EcoVadis is an Ariba partner that assesses supplier sustainability and helps procurement practitioners make informed and impactful sourcing decisions, which are trillions of dollars on a global scale. According to Emily Rakowski, chief marketing officer at EcoVadis and “friend of the site,” the company helps its procurement customers scale sustainability efforts in order to have an impact, one that extends far beyond their own operatoins. EcoVadis draws on information from SAP Ariba Risk Factors and Verisk Maplecroft, as well as country and category information, and then helps their customers bring that focus down to the supplier level. There, they assess and score suppliers based on 21 different criteria – environmental, social factors, fair-business practices, plus how suppliers manage their own suppliers. Finally, they help procurement teams draw actionable intelligence from their findings so that category managers and buyers can make informed decisions.
Being the Change
Last but not least, Ariba has partnered with Premikati, an Indiana-based management consulting firm that specializes in Ariba implementations, and Step Up for Students, a Florida-based non-profit organization that serves children and parents of children in Florida. Step Up provides scholarships to K-12 students and helps parents of students access educational resources, like counselors, materials, technology, and tutors, as well as manage educational savings accounts. According to Jonathan Beckham, VP of technology innovation and strategy, Step Up for Students operated almost entirely on paper and fax, which meant that registration forms, grant and scholarship applications, and reimbursement requests would all have to be done by hand. It was a logistical and bureaucratic labyrinth.
Wonderfully, the same digital innovations that power the Ariba Network lend themselves nicely to other digital networks. As a result, Ariba worked with Premikati to develop My ScholarShop, Step Up’s own online educational resource marketplace. Now, parents can easily find resources and engage with service providers, purchase goods and services, manage educational funds, and even use scholarship funds to pay for resources directly rather than buy them out-of-pocket and submit for reimbursement. This last feature is a game changer for many parents and children who previously were unable to access scholar-ship funds because they did not have enough cash on hand to cover the upfront, out-of-pocket expenses.
Step Up for Students and My ScholarShop have been literal lifesavers for thousands of Florida children and their families; and one child, in particular. During the Day 1 main stage presentation, Katie Swingle, a mother of four boys, including her autistic son, Gregory, gave a compelling and emotional account of her family’s years-long struggle to help her son access education at all costs. At age two, Gregory was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Against all odds, Katie and her husband resolved to send Gregory to school and labored for years to prepare him for kindergarten. After a heartbreaking false start, Katie rebounded and found another school in Florida that could help Gregory. But tuition was prohibitively expensive, even on her husband’s lawyer salary. Determined to give their son at least one semester at the school, the Swingles drew on their savings and retirement funds and borrowed money to pay the tuition bill.
During that time, Gregory made significant advances and it became clear that he would excel at the school. The Swingles were elated, but were left wondering how they could keep up with tuition. They learned of the “school choice” option in Florida, and that they could use school vouchers to pay the tuition bill. Step Up for Students administered the vouchers, and helped the Swingles use them to pay for not only Gregory’s tuition, but other resources, like counseling, materials, and tutors. It was a life-changing moment for the Swingles, whose son would be able to access the resources he needed to overcome the obstacles set before him and reach his full potential. As Valerie Blatt, Global VP of seller enablement at SAP Ariba and fellow “warrior mom” said, SAP Ariba is proud to work with Premikati and Step Up for Students to enable families like the Swingles to access educational resources and scholarships to help kids like their son, Gregory, succeed in life.
Final Thoughts
SAP Ariba not only facilitates the change it wants to see in the world in the partnerships it maintains, it also drives the change by applying its business applications to improve the human experience. It also models the change it wants to see with its “Autism at Work” program, which recruits people with Autism to work for SAP and currently employees up to 300 people on the spectrum. It’s a program that Katie Swingle implored other businesses to adopt, because many people with Autism have unique and valuable perspectives; they see things that the neuro-typical among us do not, and it can lead to amazing breakthroughs in business, science, technology, and across the human experience.
Change is uncomfortable, but it is necessary if we as organizations, as people, and as a society are going to grow. Ariba and its partners are dreaming big and going for it.
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