Is there confusion with SAP SRM suite positioning after acquisition of Frictionless commerce (now rebranded SAP E-Sourcing)? – Part 2
Why is it difficult to convince customers to have both these applications operational in the same landscape?
- Frictionless commerce (now SAP E-Sourcing) has overlapping functionalities with SAP SRM which happens to be its core SRM solution
- Customers already using SAP SRM, would need a strong business case to convince CPO desk for SAP E-Sourcing licenses
- Integrate the applications, as they don’t talk to each other still.
- What is the ROI for such an integration
- Is there a customer base that will really look forward to integrate these 2 applications
There is another application, xCLM (Composite application for Contract Lifecycle Management) which SAP is very successful in selling.
This application has the category management and the contract management functionalities of Frictionless commerce. The sourcing functionality has been removed.
Now the confusion with customers grew bigger. Customers were simply unable to understand the classification.
Was there a need to strip the same application and make it available to customers to get more licenses?
I think, potentially there’s more to this than just stripping and rebranding.
I think there was a strong realization from SAP on the positioning perspective. Let’s understand the underlying logic.
Category Management and Contract Authoring and collaboration, were one of the major gaps with SAP SRM, if we plug this gap by making a bolt on application available, it would strengthen the business case for adoption of an SAP on SAP solution than going with “Best of Breed”.
In addition to that, customers can still continue to use the sourcing processes with SAP SRM and plug-in xCLM to handle category mgmt and contract management to overcome the overlapping functionality syndrome.
So I leave the discussion open
…with Frictionless commerce coming in, are most of these gaps for SAP SRM suite offering eliminated or is there a stronger recommendation from the rest of the world?
This application has the category management and the contract management functionalities of Frictionless commerce. The sourcing functionality has been removed.
Now the confusion with customers grew bigger. Customers were simply unable to understand the classification.
Was there a need to strip the same application and make it available to customers to get more licenses?
I think, potentially there’s more to this than just stripping and rebranding.
I think there was a strong realization from SAP on the positioning perspective. Let’s understand the underlying logic.
Category Management and Contract Authoring and collaboration, were one of the major gaps with SAP SRM, if we plug this gap by making a bolt on application available, it would strengthen the business case for adoption of an SAP on SAP solution than going with “Best of Breed”.
In addition to that, customers can still continue to use the sourcing processes with SAP SRM and plug-in xCLM to handle category mgmt and contract management to overcome the overlapping functionality syndrome.
So I leave the discussion open
…with Frictionless commerce coming in, are most of these gaps for SAP SRM suite offering eliminated or is there a stronger recommendation from the rest of the world?
Comments
So in cases where customers do have SAP R/3 ERP without SAP SRM, and are looking for a "spend management solution" that grabs data from SAP R/3 and other data sources, still the implementation of SAP E-Sourcing would be a recommendable solution? Or would other "best of breed" solutions bring a better return?
Anyone experienced with the spend management solution "SoftconCIS"?
Posted by: Steve | June 16, 2009 9:32 AM
Hi Steve
Please note that the SAM BI-BW solution has extended functionalities for Spend Analytics. If there is no SRM in the landscape, data from ERP can be extracted into the SAP BW cube and reported with BoBJ.
E-Sourcing Spend reports can be used wherever applicable and necessary. However it can't do spend analytics. It has to be coupled with SAP Spend Analytics (SAP SA) to provide the desired output.
Regards
Tridip
Posted by: tridip | August 27, 2009 7:26 AM