Concur & Ariba - best of friends?

[DavidW]

Anyone have both Ariba and Concur in use at your organization?

If so, any overlaps or "I wish we would have done this instead during implementation...."

[kristyhourd]

We use both Concur and Ariba systems (all owned by SAP now, I'm hoping for some overall consistensies between the programs as time passes?)

We administrate the systems separately and use them for different functions (Concur for travel and staff reimbursement, Ariba for invoicing). There is sometimes a bit of confusion over which system a user should be using, but that comes down to policy awareness, and overall it works well. Using two separate systems allows us to really tailor system function to our specific needs.

We also introduced the two systems on different timelines, we didn't implement them together - so we took our time with each implementation.

[DavidW]

Thank you so much Kristy for the information.

Are you just using Ariba for invoicing or also the Catalog/search/vendor modules?

Based on your reply, you are defining Concur as a  "T&E ONLY" solution. 

Here is the business case we are trying to solve:

Users use Concur to expense p-card purchases (this would include MRO materials as well). We would like to have some kind of Analytics in Concur that  tells us when we should consider moving these purchases to Ariba, and then blocking these vendors from pcard purchases or expensing in Concur without management approval. 

Do you do anything like that ?

[kristyhourd]

We use Ariba for all procurement, so anything being purchased (that isn't travel), Ariba is the first stop - vendor catalogues, contracts, invoices, etc. We reconcile our purchasing cards and review reconciliations and vendor summaries outside of Concur or Ariba - and from there we report on vendors and expenses that should be moved from the PCard to Ariba.

But, I do know that you could set up a direct feed between Concur and a credit card if you're using US Bank (I'm not sure if other banks are set up to do this), and that would give you the reporting ability in Cognos for those cards' expenses. You could then set up merchant blocks on the card program through the bank, and/or create audit rules for approvals around vendors or amount thresholds on the cards. We have a travel card program that is connected directly to Concur through US Bank, so we've done some of this for different reasons.