Overall, my experience with SAP has been that it drives strong process discipline and automation in procurement execution, particularly requisition and approval workflows with consistent action-based notifications and visibility. Ariba is a solid enterprise platform for enforcing process controls - approvals and transaction routing are systematic and auditable - but day-to-day success depends heavily on how well onboarding and integrations are tuned.

SAP Ariba has been rolled out across the company over the last couple of years, and almost without exception day to day users have complained of difficulty using the system, even though almost all are fully in support of the rationale for a central purchasing tool such as this. Of course, it has yielded cost saving benefits that have made it ultimately worthwhile, but the taste in the mouth left by the transition, largely down to the tool itself, do not make this a tool I would recommend at this time.