Case Study: Leading Marketer of Accessories and Gifts achieves rapid seller identification and cuts sourcing lead time to 3–4 days with SAP Ariba (Ariba Discovery)

Quick and Easy Seller Identification Large Pre-Qualified Seller Database

A leading marketer of accessories and gifts sold worldwide was struggling with a slow, tedious seller-identification process that relied on general Internet searches and could take several weeks. The company found it difficult to conduct Supply Market Analysis or discover best‑in‑class and human‑service providers (searches like “cleaning services” returned millions of irrelevant results), making it time‑consuming and unreliable to identify high‑quality sellers.

The company adopted Ariba Discovery to match sourcing postings to relevant, pre‑qualified sellers from a 500,000‑member commerce network, enabling its Strategic Sourcing team to run faster, more effective market analyses. The result: hundreds of sellers matched to postings (about 10 responses per posting), sourcing lead time dropped from weeks to 3–4 days, 20 high‑quality sellers were identified where none had been found before, and the company now uses Ariba Discovery for every sourcing event with other groups also adopting the tool.