Case Study: Media Entertainment Company exceeds savings expectations and gains enterprise-wide spend visibility with SAP Ariba (Ariba Spend Visibility)

Exceeding Savings Expectations While Obtaining Increased Visibility Across Numerous Corporate Functions

A leading media and entertainment company — one of the world’s top broadcasters with >$14B in annual sales, 26,000 employees and $6B in global spend — needed to formalize its strategic sourcing organization across a dispersed, multilingual global structure. Challenges included 33 source systems, limited C‑level visibility despite procurement buy‑in, and difficulty securing dedicated internal IT resources.

The company implemented Ariba Spend Visibility as its central sourcing intelligence tool, completing Phase 1 in 120 days and analyzing $3.75B of spend; 90% of spend was classified (82% to L3/L4) and supplier parentage identified for 91% of supplier spend. The platform revealed three times the expected spend on security services — producing savings that alone exceeded the three‑year subscription cost — while delivering cross‑functional visibility, benchmarking for strategic suppliers, ongoing data enrichment, and a stronger relationship with IT.