Hi - I have a long history of building spend management applications at HP - first for Direct Procurement and most recently for our Indirect and Services procurement orgs. There's a problem that we've not been able to solve easily, or in an acceptable manner, yet and I'm wondering A) if anyone else has this problem or if it's unique to HP, B) if Ariba is planning a solution and/or C) if anyone else has solved it successfully.
There are multiple scenarios in which spend that we're interested in leveraging isn't on our systems. Any purchases that are made 'On Behalf Of' HP, by an outsourced manufacturer or services provider, or spend we've passed through credit card companies for t&e transactions, as examples, should be leverageable by us but are very difficult to get to. Principally those in which we've in some way influenced the supplier decision. We leveraged a proprietary framework and data standards for Direct Procurement, but we were trading PO data and not payment data, so the spend wasn't trusted. Add to that the challenge that vendors don't always want to share prices and it gets even more difficult.
It would be preferable to have a single framework through which all such transactions could flow, so we don't have to define different architectures and data trading standards for the multiple scenarios.
I"m hard pressed to believe that we're the only ones with this problem. Is there a solution already out there somewhere?